BIOTOPIKA
BIOTOPIKA is an immersive journalistic and artistic exploration of this place. It does not treat the wetland as landscape, but as presence — a living, evolving body that breathes with the community around it. Through dialogue, research, and audiovisual storytelling, the project amplifies the wetland’s voice, revealing its beauty, its complexity, and its vulnerability.
A Treasure Under Pressure
A Dialogue Across Time
BIOTOPIKA unfolded as a public dialogue in the botanical garden “Brumati” in Staranzano, moderated by journalist Benedetta Pagni. Three voices embodied three temporal dimensions:
Past — the memory of civic struggle to save the biotope.
Present — the wetland as an open-air classroom, where complexity becomes lived experience for students.
Future — the scientific urgency of wetlands as climate allies: carbon sinks, biodiversity reservoirs, natural flood protection systems.
The conversation resonated beyond the event itself. Citizens spoke of visible degradation, of disappearing water, of the need to protect the main spring and rethink water management across the plain. What emerged was not nostalgia — but responsibility.
THE Installation
Artist and researcher Francesco Scarel translated this multilayered investigation into an audiovisual installation: archival images, new field recordings, environmental soundscapes, interviews with residents, and AI-generated speculative futures intertwined in a continuous projection at Dobialab during the DAE25 media art and music festival.
Projected through the building’s windows, the work dissolved the boundary between inside and outside, between documentation and imagination.
A listening station offered intimate testimonies from local inhabitants, weaving personal memory with ecological uncertainty.
