3 questions with Benedetta Panisson

by Benedetta Panisson

Currently, we can see a rising practice of exploring ecology, blue space & our relations with it through a lens of queer theory. What is your idea of this connection?

It’s a small marvel amidst a general gloom. The ecological relationship between queer theory and blue spaces is not only increasing but also the slow emergence of a long history: for centuries, cultural and moral devices have defined a notion of “nature” that oscillated between viewing it as a subordinate, promiscuous, controllable being, and as a pure, powerful entity. In short, nature was always placed on the extreme margins. The same power device defined the concept of “woman” with the same attributes and the same oscillation: either a pure being, or extremely impure. Patriarchal frameworks were compounded by colonialism, globalizing a hierarchy that invented marginalized subjects to define central ones. But it is in aquatic spaces and among insular peoples that the attribution of femininity reached its peak. “Feminized,” in past centuries, meant something different from the dominant sexual norm. Today, we’d say queer. Think, for example, of 19th-century sexologists seeking different sexual models among island peoples, or the erotic exoticism for the oceans. For me, it’s important to view this current meeting between queer studies and performativity with blue spaces not as a trendy affectation, but as the fruit of a long history that can make it feel less hostile and more intimate to us. We could talk about the queer reappropriation of an aquatic space that has long been considered already queer. All this effort to reinvent “nature” makes it clear that nature has always been understood as conveying a message. And now is the moment for a queer message.
Linnaeus’ example is always explicit: in the 18th century, he saw Christian sexual order in plants, in their stamens and pistils. He argued that the heteronormative, marital model of Christianity was shown by nature itself. We like to convince ourselves that nature tells the truth, various truths: it’s an anthropomorphic illusion that works. Today, sexual and gender cultures are expanding, and the variability of gender expressions, hermaphroditism, sexual techniques, and courtship behaviors exhibited by oceanic and abyssal creatures align closely with what queer studies have needed—just as Linnaeus used stamens and pistils. In short, queer culture has fallen in love with blue spaces. As Stephen Gould, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, said: “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”   In a contemporary world fed by hate, this is a courageous erotic act.

In your work you have explored and presented queer sea creatures and interspecies sexualities, what is your idea in using hydrosexuality in your art research? How can this be a tool for artivism?

After many years spent studying the structuring of human culture and sexual practices—limited by belonging to a single species— and working on artistic projects about this, I felt it was essential to observe animal sexuality. As an islander, it seemed spontaneous to be attracted by the sexuality of marine creatures. I would add that in my deep dive into the nexus between waterscapes, bodies, and queer studies, both as a visual artist and as an academic researcher, I consider it fundamental to create an interconnection between oceanic cultures scattered across every corner of the planet, particularly regarding knowledge and relationships with marine creatures. The structures of sexual knowledge we apply to humans are often the same ones we apply to animal sexuality. At that point, about thirty years ago, animal critical studies emerged, rooted in feminist theory, with the mission of uncovering the cultural and moral biases we impose on animals. Thanks to my collaboration with WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, I worked on a 1993 video footage of two abyssal octopuses performing a sexual act. They were two males, from two different species. The video is stunning, and that’s why my current project is focused on bringing these visuals out of the archives as if they were works of art, often forgotten. Every time this material resurfaced, it generated shock: cataloged as an anomaly, promiscuity, something so strange it couldn’t even be named. What excites me, however, isn’t just the hypothesis that abyssal octopuses of two different species might engage in homosexual acts at 2,500 meters deep, in total darkness, but that such acts might change how we think about animals, that it means as functional organs acting in accordance with a natural plan. I’m biased, but I believe that feminist and queer studies, along with the artistic practices related to them, can help us rethink, in collaboration with other knowledges, not just which sexual practices belong to animals or humans, but to recreate the very notion of nature. When I started working on another abyssal creature, where the male is nothing but a small parasite attached to the larger body of the female, dependent on her, I thought that if Linnaeus had established this as the example provided by nature—not stamens and pistils united in a heterosexual marriage for reproduction—the course of history would have taken an entirely different shape. And by history, I mean all of history, not just that of sex and gender. Every time I encounter animal sexuality, it feels like a maritime storm, but this storm exists only in our eyes. That’s why, although I’m working on queer animal sexualities as an artist and academic, in truth, I’m working on that storm.

An act of ceremony with water can also be seen by others in the hydrofeminist movement, for example the cyber nymphs marriage to the brine shrimp, or the ecosexual blue wedding to the sea, why do you think this is the case? What is the importance of tying human ritualistic practices to water bodies?

From childhood, we Venetians are taught—often in an exoticized way—the ritual of marriage to the sea: since the year 1000, the Doge, Venice’s highest authority, and today the mayor, marry the Adriatic Sea. They do this by casting a gold ring into the waves. It’s done as a symbol of dominion, as declared in the words of the ritual, which define the sea as feminine: through the wedding act, the sea-female-bride is subdued so that explorations and trade are not disrupted by storms. I believe there are three key points to address, with the long-term aim of transforming this research into a collective performance in Venetian waters. First, the understanding of the sea as female, and thus tamable, can instead become a fluid relationship, one outside of gender binaries, because the sea has no gender. Second, the use of a heteronormative wedding form as a hierarchical structure of domination could become a horizontal relationship—intense and physical, or perhaps light and immaterial—but I don’t believe a marriage is necessary. Finally, the evident political and economic value of marriage to the sea declares an intention to exploit it,

whereas this could instead become an ecological action—one of respect and love. This is Queer Sea Marriage.

When the project was presented at the Materiality at the Intersection of Ecology and Religious Studies, conference, it already had a dual form: an academic inquiry into the relationships between sea peoples’ cultures and aquatic spaces, analyzed through the lens of gender and queer studies, and a work-in-progress of a collective performance with my Venetian community. I consider the upcoming step at Transeuropa Festival, at the invitation of the Arcipelago Association, to be crucial for beginning to think collectively about how an artistic project can become a collective action, an intimate collective action.
I’d like to deconstruct it, minimize it, make it quiet yet powerful, inclusive, physical, and ironic. The Venetian marriage to the sea has all the elements to be playfully turned upside down.
In the research I’ve conducted over time on this kind of performativity, I came across Wedding to the Sea by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens—coming from porn studies, I consider them mythological figures—and I found it marvelous that the two artists performed this in Venice without knowing that the marriage to the sea existed here. When they found out, it took on even more significance. I also learned about the project by Ewelina Jarosz and Justyna Gorowska, which intersects with an interspecies marriage as a form of protection for a tiny aquatic creature, because we were published together in Antennae Journal, “Queering Nature”, issue 63. It’s crucial to create an extended archipelago of cultures and performative arts related to the sea, because the sea is what connects them—a queer archipelago.
As for how I currently imagine my Queer Sea Marriage, I admit that I’m already inside an aesthetic and performative dynamic that feels very personal to me: a process of stripping away, lightening, making it minimal, almost infinitesimal. And if the performance works even when reduced to its bare essentials, then we’re there. We can do without the boat adorned with statues of the Doge, without the gold ring, the religious formulas, the exposed grandeur, the distance between the man of power at the bow and the waves below. I imagine it as a silent, collective immersion in the sea, standing there, eyes toward the horizon, all the Venetians together, listening for an answer that will never come: Does the sea want any of this?

Photo credits:

01. People Do Water, 2013-2024, printed in 2024, photographic print on lambda from negative film, edition of 3, Courtesy of OPR Galley.

02. Sexual Display from the Abyss, 2022, still from 1993 footage 4885, courtesy of WHOI ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Benedetta Panisson is an artist and researcher working with film photography, video installation, live performance and drawing. Her research focuses on extended relations among sea and insular territories, bodies, imaginaries, communities, and their margins, mainly in relation with sexual aesthetics, visual, gender and queer studies.