Arsenale to citizens: Venice, demonstrates against cession to Biennale and Navy

On Sunday, February 6, many activists in Venice took to the streets to protest the Arsenale Protocol. This is a protocol between the Municipality of Venice, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Defense for the redevelopment and enhancement of the Arsenal, and which the associations, in particular the Forum Futuro Arsenale, are asking the mayor not to sign in order to instead initiate a dialogue with the city to allocate the 7 tense of the Arsenal, which according to the protocol should return to the Navy and the Biennale, to spaces for activities that are not only temporary.

In 2012, the then city administration had managed to return the Arsenal to the city after a long period of neglect, at which point the Navy was supposed to vacate the warehouses, but so far no recovery project has been presented. The following year the compendium was tripartitioned: the first part to the municipality, the second to the State Property Office, and the third consists of properties owned by the municipality but used free of charge by the Navy. If the protocol was signed, the area owned by the municipality would be given to the Biennale and the Navy.

The manifesto for the Feb. 6 Forum Futuro Arsenale states that 2012 should have marked a momentous step to begin “a wide-ranging planning, both on the level of physical as well as functional and social recovery, to make the Arsenal become the engine and place of the revitalization of the historic city.” He continues: “The Municipality of Venice on the contrary has abandoned, starting with the last center-left junta and continuing until today, any hypothesis of unitary management and has progressively delegated the use of the Arsenal to subjects - the Navy, Biennale and Consorzio Venezia Nuova - who dispose of it according to their own purposes without relating to the city. The Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministries of Defense and Culture for the redevelopment project is the last and final act in this process. The Municipality demotes important spaces it owns to the Navy and the Biennale, renounces continuous use for the benefit of the city of the Great Dock, notes that the entire complex, except for residual parts recovered at the time through the company Arsenale s.p.a, is definitively precluded from citizen access: in short, it renounces any plans to transform the Arsenal into a part of the city that is alive, open, and productive and capable of dialoguing with the world.”

The association has therefore launched a major mobilization to ask the mayor of Venice not to sign the Protocol; the Minister of Defense "not to proceed with the signing of the Protocol, to comply with what is established by law by returning to the city spaces in temporary use, now unused and that have nothing to do with the institutional purposes of the Navy to which is however, guaranteed an important presence corresponding to the role it must have in the city; to the Minister of Culture to “not proceed with the signing of the Protocol, to fulfill in an accomplished manner its responsibilities for the preservation and enhancement of the tangible and intangible heritage of theArsenal, to supervise the application of the Faro Convention, to identify activities of a productive nature and not just exhibition inside the Arsenal”; to the President of the Biennale to “dialogue more with the city for the use of the spaces that are granted to it and the activities not only temporary that it can activate, not to compromise the other cultural realities present or in the process of formation with an expansion that is not concerted with other city needs”; to theCity Administration to “organize a Public debate to gather ideas and projects, evaluate and decide on the unified use and management of the Arsenal complex.”

Sunday’s demonstration was well attended: many activists were on foot and by boat in front of the Arsenal, united in asserting that the latter should belong to the citizens. “We don’t want to send away Biennale and Marina Militare, but we think about creating spaces for Venetians, for the recovery of historic boats, traditional arts and crafts,” said the Arzanà di Cannaregio association.

Arsenale to citizens: Venice, demonstrates against cession to Biennale and Navy

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