As the visitor enters the vast hall of the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo in Venice, Italy, it feels like entering an underwater world. Sound, sculpture, and movement come together to form a fantastical ecosystem populated by creatures that belong to neither the sea, the land, nor the skies.

Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas is the first site-specific, large-scale, joint installation by Berlin-based artists Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. They were co-commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the art program of the luxury Swiss watchmaker and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s research arm, TBA21–Academy. On view at Ocean Space, Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas is one half of the exhibition ‘Thus waves come in pairs’, curated by Barbara Casavecchia, alongside the installation Sempre il mare, uomo libero, amerai! by American-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal.

‘The ocean becomes a tool to release us from land-based binaries and land-based logics,’ says TBA21–Academy’s codirector Markus Reymann. ‘It’s a way to think with fluidity and has been instrumental in approaching this co-commission with Audemars Piguet Contemporary.’

For Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, Halilaj and Urbano have created an ecosystem in a nave of the San Lorenzo church that echoes the Venetian landscape, where water, nature, and human activity are so closely juxtaposed. It’s the first joint commission in the history of Ocean Space, which is the physical center of TBA21–Academy’s environmental advocacy work and ocean research program. The church only reopened to the public in 2019, after two years of restoration and, prior to that, almost 100 years of only sporadic use. Its intermittent use for art events and its history as a monastical site for Benedictine monks fed into how the artists wanted to use the space.

‘Álvaro’s background as an architect means he has an interesting perception of living spaces. He wanted to find a way to make it alive – not to just consider it as a cold environment, but to give the space its own voice,’ explains Audrey Teichmann, curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary. ‘The artists saw the space before conceiving anything. It really is art in situ.’

A large moon in the shape of an egg hangs from the church’s high ceiling, nurturing the life below: a flotilla of aluminum sculptures scattered throughout the space. Three amber lamps cast rays of light over the silvery creatures, catching the tips of their fins, a flank, a scaled side, or a gill. But as you get closer, you notice confusing details: is that a fin or a feather? Is that a beak or a snout? The sculptures seem to mutate; it’s unclear whether they are sea or land animals. They are placed on tripods of varying heights, as though caught in currents and swimming upwards towards the surface. The light lands on the beaten metal like sunlight dappled through water, creating a sense of movement, like a school of darting fish.

Audemars Piguet Contemporary supports artists in pushing the boundaries of their practice and experimenting with new ideas; for Halilaj and Urbano, this was exploring the use of sound in their installation. Pointing to the bare bricks where two huge organs once bookended both sides of the chapel, Halilaj describes how this nave would once have been filled with the sound of Benedictine nuns singing, unseen, in the adjoining nave, and how he and Urbano wanted to bring music back to the space.

That’s why the aluminum sculptures also double as musical instruments and are designed to be moved and manipulated. Trumpets and horns have tubes that curl over themselves like the tendrils of a squid as it billows upwards, while the long cylinder of a clarinet imitates the undulating length of an eel. A waterphone in the shape of a jellyfish makes haunting, whale-like sounds when played with a cellist’s bow, but other sculptures only need to be moved slightly to create music, such as the clusters of bells hanging like a sac of roe underneath the belly of a fishlike creature.

A manta ray can be manually opened and closed like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings, distorting and amplifying the melody of an attached music box. It is one of two creatures in the exhibition equipped with music boxes that play a traditional song popular for children in Spain called ‘¡Ay, mi pescadito!’ ‘¡Ay, mi pescadito, deja de llorar! Ay, mi pescadito, no llores ya más . . .’ – Urbano’s grandmother sang him this song, which tells the story of young fish going to school at the bottom of the sea to learn how to evade capture.

Teichmann explains that the song is divided between the two music boxes, and if they are started at exactly the same time, it can reproduce the melody perfectly. ‘The hybrid creatures need humans to be activated. It’s about how we can work together to bring a voice out of an environment, and about how to build collective intelligence,’ she adds.

The show is also accompanied by a monthly performance that begins with around 20 performers and musicians assembling on the large square outside, before flowing into the church ‘like water flows into the sea,’ as Halilaj puts it. The crowd could also resemble a parade or protest. When conceptualizing the show, the artists were thinking about collective rituals, such as the Spanish tradition of ‘El Entierro de la Sardina’ at the end of carnival. This ritual involves burning a symbolic effigy – often a sardine – to celebrate an ending and rebirth. They wanted to give the exhibition a carnivalesque atmosphere, even down to the use of costumes. Halilaj and Urbano will participate in two performances, dressed in full-size herring gull costumes.

‘There’s a hugely playful aspect to the exhibition,’ laughs Teichmann. ‘It’s not just about creating this ecosystem, it’s also about bringing people together with joy.’

Halilaj is eager to stress that he wants the performance to be different every time. ‘What we want is for there never to be a fully-completed show. It is a constant questioning, a way to ask social and environmental questions.’

The artists describe the installation as an ongoing ‘rehearsal for new worlds, for new opportunities’ in the face of climate change and other challenges faced by society today. The title of the installation – Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas – evokes the changes that are to come and the need to work together to prevent tragedy. At the heart of the show is the concept of coexistence: humans learning to live alongside one another and nature, and even for different species to listen to each other and learn to think collectively.

The exhibition ‘Thus waves come in pairs’, including Halilaj and Urbano’s installation Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas will be on view at Ocean Space in Venice, within the historic deconsecrated San Lorenzo church through November 5, 2023. The work was co-commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and TBA21–Academy and highlights the two programs’ parallel missions: to support artists in research and artistic production, which encourages dialogue and imaginative thinking for a global audience. For more information, please visit: Audemars Piguet Contemporary: Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas.

Catherine Bennett is a French-British freelance journalist and translator, based between France and Italy. She writes about travel, cities, culture, tech, and the environment.

Published on May 11, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom : 1, 4. Installation view of Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, Ocean Space, Venice, 2023. Courtesy of the artists, TBA21–Academy, and Audemars Piguet. 2, 3. In the studio of Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano, spring 2023. Courtesy of the artists, TBA21–Academy, and Audemars Piguet.