Wooden ships
by Fabio D’Arsiè
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
“We are spirits shrouded in water, we are whale skeletons bleached by the sun, we are dead trees where cormorants dry their wings in the light.”
A visual investigation of a place suspended in time: a cemetery of abandoned boats along the waters of the Sile River in Casier. Here lie the burci, ancient cargo vessels that for centuries played a vital role in the economy of the Veneto region.
Abandoned in the 1970s following the crisis triggered by the colza oil scandal and the growing dominance of road transport, these boats are now silent relics, absorbed by vegetation and water. Their slow decay tells the story of the end of a productive system and of a working culture tied to the river, gradually replaced by new industrial and infrastructural logics.
Review by URBANAUTICA
Fabio D’Arsiè’s project restores to the traditional river wooden ships, so called "burci" of the Sile River their status as relics of a past that is not so distant in time, yet feels profoundly removed from our present. These ancient cargo boats, once central to a river-based economy that connected territories, goods, and communities, are now silent vessels, slowly being reclaimed by water and vegetation.Their decay tells the story of the end of a productive system and a working culture tied to the river, displaced by the speed of road transport and new industrial and infrastructural logics. Yet these wrecks are more than mere remnants of what has disappeared: they become a means of questioning our economic and social model, inviting us to reflect on the value of time, our relationship with the land, and the transformations in the ways we live and produce.
Today, immersed in a nature reserve and surrounded by paths that invite visitors to experience the landscape at a slower pace, the "burci" can be encountered differently. They are no longer simply the ruins of a vanished activity, but presences that open up new ways of engaging with the past.
D’Arsiè’s work thus reminds us how narrow the distance can be between what we consider history and what we recognise as the present: very little time has passed, yet the world has already changed radically.