In the long night of November 12, 2019, the sirens keep sounding, and so did our phones: messages, photos and videos circulated in private chats and on social networks, “staring” at the anguish of those frantic hours.
At the same time, the control units of the Municipality and the tide detection stations recorded an important amount of data. People and sensors report the same event, albeit in different ways: the subjectivity of the chats versus the objectivity of the recordings; emotions versus numbers. But are they really two irreconcilable fields? Is it possible, thanks to data, to recreate the amazement of that night?

Both data and people also recorded the differences of that night.
While most of the city was literally under the water, some others where safe and “dry” and finally did not experience any damage. So, this project commemorates the Aquagranda event by questioning how the high tide invested the city in a different way.

Because Venice is not completely "flat", it has a height above the sea level that fluctuates between 80 and 200 cm. This means that the city is not evenly submerged during high tides. And the same happened on the night of AquaGranda: many areas (the best known) were seriously flooded by water, while in others almost nothing happened.

The altimetric data of Venice have been “cleaned” and transformed into a discretized chromatic gradient. This base was then used to visualize the “real” water level reached in the city thanks to the use of 850 Murano glass canes, cut and worked by hand. The canes, of four different colours and different heights, reproduce to scale the violence of that exceptional tide. The Murano glass stands as a metaphor for water and fixes – as in a photo – the maximum peak reached on the night of AquaGranda 2019. The final effect is that of a water skyline: a SkyTide.

For one year, eight SkyTide sculptures will show to citizen and tourist the violence of that night.
The pieces can be seen at:

• Ca’ Pesaro // International Gallery of Modern Art
• Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani
• Fondazione Querini Stampalia
• Palazzo Ca’ Foscari
• Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa // Galleria di Piazza San Marco
• Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello
• ISMAR-CNR // Istituto di Scienze Marine
• Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi