"August 2019; Piacenza. The warm padano, sticky, inexorable, which marks the hours from dawn to evening and the flu in the night. Almost by mistake, in the automatic gestures of false computerized researches, after having registered the mail, read messages and fulfilled the electronic deontology, I come across Barene. I knew nothing about them. I look at photos, videos and read articles. Suddenly present. They attract me. I imagine. And immediately I put in memories, paradoxically distant in time and space from me and from the salt marshes. Peru, Lake Titicaca and the floating islands of the Uros. They are non-existent islands, "flotantes" like the natives, built and destroyed by men with totora reeds. My computer returns to the Barene, the current but never touched by my hands.

An archipelago of tufts of grass periodically submerged by the tides, promptly reported by Punta della Salute. Ninety square kilometers of meaningless intertwining, of "ghebi" that is found and dissolved, their soil is clayey, "salty soil" -they call it this- for the advanced concentration of chlorides, where an halophile area grows and survives, tenacious and perched on salted soils. A precious veil of nature with sudden contours that limits the impact of tides and waves, forming a shroud of expanded waters, now devoid of force and destructive force. And like the islas flotantes their life depends on the hand of the man who digs deep canals, causing disproportionate waves with steam factories and accidental acceleration, modification, disappearance. Forgotten lagoon ecosystem, it preserves from the currents Venice and all its islands. Unlike velme, totally devoid of conditions and emerging on their own in particular low tide conditions, the salt marshes are courageous bulwarks always present, with lemon trees perfumed with floral decorations.

We have imagined, we dreamers without restraint, the salt marshes as rough places, indispensable and yet ignored, left to live in their immense solitude. Silent plant trenches that challenge the sea, which resist its strength, which save human worlds without any reward or even gratitude. Ignored plant souls who perform difficult, impossible, disproportionate functions for the preservation of an ecosystem put to the test by those who receive their saving work. The sandbanks for us dreamers (without the possibility of redemption) are proof of the strength of the earth, of a vegetable resistance that despite having challenged centuries of war, no one has ever recognized. For us constellation wayfarers the sandbanks are a tacit incitement, yet poignantly poetic over a thousand words, to resist "everything", without sinking, without any fear. And at the same time to create and be a geometry of palpable, visible, artistically active "resistance". Where the salt marshes exist, where they appear in their being alive protiform ganglia show - without any word - their being art" - Francesco Paolo Paladino