can repair begin with return? ‘tide of returns’ brings ancestral memory to venice

ocean space turns return into a living landscape

Inside Ocean Space in Venice, the former Church of San Lorenzo holds Tide of Returns with a sense of weight already built into its walls. The long nave, the worn stone, and the lagoon just beyond the city’s edges give the exhibition a charged setting for thinking about return across water, memory, and displaced cultural objects.

Presented by TBA21–Academy, the exhibition opens the 2026 season at Ocean Space and runs from March 28th to October 11th, 2026, alongside the 61st Venice Art Biennale. Based on the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective and curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, the project brings together artists, filmmakers, and Indigenous communities from Australia’s Pacific North, South and West Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

Its central question is direct: what does return mean when the route back is shaped by law, ceremony, family memory, and the ocean itself?

Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

repatriation moves through sand, shell, and song

Across both wings of the former church, Tide of Returns treats repatriation as a lived process. The exhibition begins from cultural objects removed through colonial histories and held in museum collections far from the communities that made them.

TBA21 notes two recent points of reference: the return of twenty-three objects from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin to Namibia in 2022, and Manchester Museum’s return of 174 cultural heritage items to the Warnindilyakwa community in Australia in 2023.

In the west wing, the Repatriates Collective presents From My Mother’s Country, a newly commissioned installation made with reddish sand, thousands of small figures, video, and sound. The figures are formed from shell, grasses, and textile, gathering across the ground like a landscape of bodies and ancestral presence.

Sand from Anindilyakwa Country fills the space with the color and texture of place, while the installation holds stories of clans, kinship, and songlines through material rather than explanation.

Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

woven water in the east wing

In the east wing, German-Bolivian artist Verena Melgarejo Weinandt presents Weaving Connections, a textile and video installation that follows water through fabric, hair, and gesture. Blue-toned textiles hang within the former church, threaded with black braids that suggest river currents and strands of memory.

A three-channel video follows a performance of preparing, braiding, and washing textiles in a river, bringing the work back to the body as a place where cultural knowledge can be carried.

During the Biennale opening program, Melgarejo Weinandt also performed Braiding Connections inside Ocean Space, extending the installation through movement and touch.

The act of braiding becomes a way of holding relation together across distance. It is simple to watch and dense in meaning, drawing attention to labor that often sits outside official histories of restitution.

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Weaving Connections, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

the lagoon enters the exhibition

Venice gives the project a particular tension. A city built through water, trade, and circulation becomes the site for an exhibition about objects and knowledge carried away from their places of origin.

At Ocean Space, the lagoon is never a neutral backdrop. It presses against the exhibition’s language of tides, crossings, and return, while the former church holds these works inside a building already marked by histories of movement.

That wider ecological frame continues in the Research Room, where Nature Speaks. Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe runs alongside Tide of Returns.

Curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi and co-produced with the NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the research unit looks at the legal recognition of the Venetian Lagoon as a living entity. The pairing places cultural restitution and ecological justice in close conversation, with water acting as both subject and method.

Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

repair as an active practice

Tide of Returns offers a way to think about softness as work, and it does this through touch, song, textile, sand, and ceremony. The show traces forms of repair that move at the pace of communities rather than institutions. It gives space to return as something unfinished, held through relationships as much as through objects.

By the end, the tide becomes more than an image. It becomes a structure for the exhibition itself, moving between Venice and Anindilyakwa Country, between Namibia and Europe, between museum collections and living cultural practice. Tide of Returns asks the viewer to stay with that movement, and to understand return as a continuing act of attention.

Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Weaving Connections, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Weaving Connections, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

Repatriates Collective, From My Mother’s Country, 2026. exhibition view of Tide of Returns, Ocean Space, Venice. commissioned and produced by TBA21-Academy. photo by Jacopo Salvi

project info:

name: Tide of Returns

event: Venice Art Biennale 2026

gallery: Ocean Space | @oceanspaceorg

location: Venice, Italy

artist (From My Mother’s Country): Repatriates Collective | @repatriates.erc

artist (Weaving Connections): Verena Melgarejo Weinandt

curator: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

dates: March 28th — October 11th, 2026

photography: © Jacopo Salvi | @jacopo_salvi

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