“Xe mejo brusar un paese che perder una tradission”

It is better to burn the land than to lose a tradition. - Venetian proverb

Fire once threatened Venice more than water. The lagoon's earliest vernacular, the casoni, was built from reed and timber. After centuries of devastating fires, combustible construction was prohibited. This severed the city from embedded ecological knowledge, preserved instead at the lagoon's margins - in the mainland festival of Panevin, a propitiatory bonfire marking the More Veneto new year.

This relationship is reinstated on Sacca San Mattia, Murano - an artificial island of construction debris - transforming Venice's largest abandoned space into a landscape of remediation and ritual. Tourism is inverted: visitors help rebuild burned elements through reed cultivation, thatching, and timber construction, alongside an artisanal fish market cultivating moeche crab. Reed, harvested and returned as ash, drives a circular system of growth, use, and renewal.