Margot Bowman – W.E.T.

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SPAZIO RIDOTTO is a new project space for multimedia art in the heart of Venice managed by Zuecca Projects. The project
space is proud to present its first collaboration with British artist Margot Bowman: W.E.T. a video and web installation that
explores the impact of climate change from a digital perspective; curated by Gloria Maria Cappelletti and Fabrizio Meris.
Margot Bowman explores the different social and emotional realities in a proposed future where extreme climate change
is a reality. Bowman creates a floating world, where water replaces the earth as the human habitat and we meet
the members of future communities and witness the impact of global warming in a new way.
The project is split into two phases:
Phase 1 - A questionnaire distributed online through w-e-t.net and during a past installation at The House of St Barnabas
in 2014. The questionnaire asks participants to consider the social, emotional and political impacts of living in this
water-based world. Both physical installation and online spaces use a variety of mediums to encourage free thinking
from participants that move away from exhausted stereotypical dystopian or utopian versions of the future.
W-e-t.net will serve as the digital home for the project, an ever accessible space for the questionnaire and relative
responses. Bringing this resource online aims to open the pool of imagination on the topic, reaching out to as many
different global participants as possible.
Phase 2 - The information collected in the forms of Phase 1 provides research and inspiration in to this new world
and the new communities that inhabit it. Bowman’s responses to this research take the form of moving images that
will be shown from March 25 till April 26 at SPAZIO RIDOTTO. The artist seeks to question the pre-digital, pre-industrial
traditions that Venice was born out of. A community, like those in W.E.T., that is based on water, but whose decisions
and structures are born out of a thoroughly top-down approach with small numbers of educated elite controlling the lives
of all those beneath them.
In an age where digital connection offers us the hope of ‘equality’ would this community be different? And with this cultural
shift in mind do our hopes and expectations for this future go beyond the walls of commerce and place us more profoundly
in touch with each other and our place in the wider eco-system? These are the questions that the artist poses.

MARGOT BOWMAN
Margot Bowman is an artist and designer working across moving image, new media, fashion, creative direction and illustration.
She is co-founder of 15Folds, an online GIF Gallery, and Creative Director of Auria, a luxury sustainable swimwear brand.
Other ongoing projects include the Painted Truths series and the digital projects: everythingissoamazing.com and W.E.T.
Since graduating from Central Saint Martins her work has been exhibited in London, Beijing and Paris.
Her work challenges the expected, making the strange beautiful and the imaginary physical.
Margot lives and works in London.
SPAZIO RIDOTTO
Spazio Ridotto, the new exhibition center in the heart of Venice managed by Zuecca Projects, is dedicated to facilitating
interdisciplinary dialogue and artistic experimentation. It will seek to provide a platform for digital artistic projects,
creating a connection between the physical exhibition space and the digital world.
The programme for Spazio Ridotto will change on a monthly basis and will aim to reflect the most current trends
in contemporary society and culture. Like Zuecca Projects, Spazio Ridotto was born from the necessity to have a place
in Venice dedicated to promoting creative exchange both locally and internationally.