Venice as a Fragile Infrastructure of Symbolic Extraction
By Andrea Saravalle
08.09.2026
Among the authors selected through the open call for critical essays on the 61st Venice Biennale.
Venice is beautiful, and there is little to add. It is a city unlike any other in the world, the result of centuries of architectural refinement and the determination to build the kind of solidity typically associated with a city of thousands of inhabitants on a lagoon. A concept that might seem almost absurd, were it not for the fact that we have seen and walked through Venice. And it is within this world, this reality, that the Venice Biennale finds its place.
For centuries, Venice has been a hub for the exchange of goods and a crossroads for ideas, visions and forms of the built environment. When we speak of the built environment, we do not simply mean the sum of its buildings, streets, bridges, squares and narrow streets, but everything a city can embed in its very DNA, in its very essence, in its unique and unmistakable character that is recognisable from the very first moment.
Indeed, we might mistake a street in one city for another, but we could never mistake a Venetian calle for a street anywhere else. The Biennale does not merely take place, exist and be passed down, one edition after another, within Venice: it is created thanks to Venice, through an indissoluble bond that is intrinsic to a uniqueness forged from art and lived experience.
ph Francesco Ungaro
Whilst, at first glance, walking through the calli and piazzas of Venice may feel like being inside a theatre, on a stage, or within the beautiful set design of a film or a literary work, we must recognise that this vision does not capture reality in all its concreteness.
Venice, in fact, is a fully-fledged productive infrastructure. The layout of the buildings, as conceived over the centuries, facilitates trade, the flow of people and goods, and all those activities that have been intrinsic to the Venetian city for centuries. To define an infrastructure is to recognise the physical structures that enable the movement not only of people, but also of objects and ideas.
This is why anyone walking through Venice embarks on a unique and unmistakable experience, a sort of journey through art. The buildings themselves set the pace and make one’s location immediately recognisable, at any time of day or night. As you sail along the canals, you might wonder whether Venice is fragile, and, to some extent, it may well be so from certain engineering perspectives, particularly in relation to global warming and rising sea levels. I would, however, like to emphasise that the nature of this city does not equate to immobility or eternal stagnation.
We are talking about a city in constant evolution and constant adaptation: a city that is clearly identifiable and whose strengths and weaknesses are plain to see, yet one that is always capable of shaping its own reality in response to changing times.
It is precisely this tension between aspirations and current reality that makes Venice a unique and distinctive case. We are not merely talking about a city that defies convention because it is built on a lagoon; rather, we wish to emphasise a city that has continually negotiated change without compromising the strength of its form.
ph Ron Lach
This perspective allows us to better understand the power and value generated by the Biennale.
Sassatelli highlights how biennales are sites of symbolic production – that is, mechanisms capable of positioning works and artists within a system of meanings. It is here that intrinsic value arises from the interplay between selection, exhibition and reception by the audience.
The city of Venice, for its part, does not participate passively, but helps to create the conditions for recognition, uniqueness and privilege. Many studies highlight how venues for the integration of cultural heritage are fundamental to creating bidirectional and interdependent relationships. The venue where an exhibition is held therefore represents an additional mark, which adds to an already established value: a sort of input through which the product acquires a concrete and identifiable value.
Broadening the analysis for a moment, we can observe how urban cultural economies are deeply linked to territorial specificities and morphology. Venice, of course, takes this example to an extreme and particularly interesting level, in a perfect fusion of architecture, water and memory. The practices that take place there are capable of generating an overall result that is difficult to achieve in other contexts, except in small tourist destinations designed as replicas.
ph Tima Miroshnichenko
The Biennale draws heavily on this uniqueness and this capacity to make itself unmistakably recognisable, renewing them and allowing access to the unique languages that have developed over the centuries within the city. It is therefore a sort of co-production between the city and the Biennale: the Biennale’s prestige reinforces Venice’s cultural centrality, whilst the city’s uniqueness makes that prestige almost inseparable from the place where the event was born and with which the human mind immediately associates it.
In economic terms, culture – or rather, the economics of culture – offers a very interesting illustration of this relationship. Throsby, in fact, defines cultural capital as an asset capable of embodying cultural value and of generating further flows of cultural and economic value over time.
If we apply this definition to urban heritage, the resulting perspective allows us to view the historic city as a living form of capital. Economic and tourism productivity, as well as social well-being, clearly depend on the ability to preserve its characteristics and convey its quality. We can therefore define Venice as a stock of tangible and intangible capital.
The Biennale, on the other hand, is one of the mechanisms through which this stock is activated and its flows of symbolic value are circulated internationally. We stated at the outset that Venice is not static: in conjunction with the Biennale, it manages to enhance its symbolic value through this circulation.
This is a form of symbolic extraction that enables works, artists and institutions to gain visibility and legitimisation of their value, thereby enhancing their standing within a globally recognised space, with cascading and closely interlinked multiplier effects.
ph Rafael Minguet Delgado
The overall flow can expand at the expense of the stock, which is by its very nature limited. To those who view the Biennale as an entity that draws from Venice – as if from an inert well – all the prestige inherent in the city, we must remind them that the city itself is an active component of the process that produces that prestige. There is, in fact, no pre-existing value and no city called upon to certify it; value emerges from the relationship between cultural content and urban space.
This union does not develop in a single direction: whilst Venice confers recognisability and a rich sense of identity upon the Biennale, the Biennale, for its part, revitalises spaces and enables Venice to be reaffirmed as an urban area in which the present is exhibited, discussed and imagined from a future perspective. We have touched upon the concept of fragility, and it is now time to clarify this point.
‘Fragile’ is not the opposite of ‘infrastructure’, although the latter term may commonly be associated with a bridge or a building. Infrastructure, in fact, is temporary in nature: it goes through phases of use, deterioration, maintenance and repair, which continually alter the material and the relationships it maintains with the city. Maintenance may be seen as tedious and unattractive in the eyes of the public, but it remains a key factor in preserving the significance of the material dimension within the experience.
Moving around the city, as well as transporting, installing or adapting, requires a constant engagement with the city’s changing form and the evolving needs within it. Extending the life of buildings is truly important, as it generates environmental, social and economic benefits that extend beyond the individual structure to the wider urban context. Symbolic value therefore depends on the widespread work of care, coordination and adaptation.
It is precisely here that we can introduce the concept of the ‘grammar of frictions’ as a further interpretative framework.
ph Ivan Setzky
Friction arises when the transition from a resource to an outcome consumes time, information, organisational capacity and trust. Not all friction, however, is wasteful: in a city as unique as Venice, we must distinguish between dissipative friction and generative friction. The former drains energy without enhancing the experience or protecting the place; the latter, by contrast, keeps the experience rooted in Venice’s unique character, slowing the gaze and requiring adaptation.
A clarification is in order: generative friction does not amount to the celebration of inconvenience for its own sake, but is a constraint that preserves meaning.
This distinction also alters the way we understand the efficiency of a fragile infrastructure such as Venice, since its performance cannot be assessed solely on the basis of the speed of flows or the volume handled. A system can become faster and, at the same time, lose the qualities that underpin its value.
The economic issue, then, lies in reducing the frictions that dissipate resources and in preserving those that safeguard the irreplaceability of cultural capital. Fragility should not be romanticised, as it entails real costs of care and coordination, but it can become an intelligent accommodation of limits.
From this perspective, the sustainability of the relationship between Venice and the Biennale depends on the circularity between flow and stock. Indeed, capital retains its productive capacity when the flows it generates do not compromise its quality and when a portion of its value is channelled back to sustain its longevity. In the cultural sphere, this return takes not only a financial form but can also translate into knowledge, skills, a focus on maintenance and new capacities for interpreting heritage.
The economically relevant question therefore becomes: what capacity remains in the place once the symbolic value has been produced? We might call ‘symbolic maintenance’ the set of processes through which visibility is reconverted into care and prestige into the capacity to endure.
ph Ivan Setzky
This does not mean attributing overall responsibility for Venice to the Biennale, nor does it mean making a political assessment of its actions. It means recognising a principle of reciprocity.
The more a global event depends on the material uniqueness of a place, the more the value it produces should help to make that place’s infrastructure legible and viable. Maintenance, in this sense, is therefore not the less noble behind-the-scenes aspect of cultural production, but the process that links the attention of the present to the possibility of passing the place on to the future.
Venice thus offers a positive and broader perspective on global symbolic economies, demonstrating that the universality of culture does not arise from the absence of constraints, but from being rooted in places capable of giving concrete form to exchange.
It also demonstrates that a fragile place can generate value without being consumed, when that fragility is recognised as an integral part of the productive process. The city is, in fact, neither a passive victim of its own appeal nor a scenic asset at the disposal of the event, but a complex material institution that participates in the production, circulation and memory of meanings.
The Biennale, therefore, would not be the same elsewhere; contemporary Venice would not be culturally the same without the Biennale. This interdependence makes the relationship economically significant.
To define Venice as a fragile infrastructure of symbolic extraction is to recognise that global prestige has local and material foundations. Its longevity depends on the ability to transform extraction into reciprocity, attention into care, and visibility into the capacity to endure into the future.
Edited in English by Dobroslawa Nowak
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