The Only Flowering Plant In The Ocean

In 2025, the Venice Biennale of Architecture invited Vessel, an artists' collective co-founded by James Bridle on the island of Aegina, Greece, to create an installation for the 19th International Exhibition. The work was collectively produced in Aegina and exhibited in Venice.

The Only Flowering Plant in the Ocean brings together Vessel's work on local ecologies, sustainable materials, architecture, design, and art in the service of our community and the planet.

Vessel has been investigating the use of seagrass (Posidonia oceanica) in vernacular architecture around the Mediterranean, as well as in contemporary architecture (as in our Saronic Segal building, completed in 2022).

Posidonia and other seagrasses are vital organisms for ocean and planetary health: constructing biospheres, storing carbon, and sustaining marine and shoreline ecologies around the world. For millennia, seagrass has been used by humans in building insulation and for other purposes; it is also under severe stress from direct human activity and anthropogenic climate change.

Historically, the glass merchants of Venice used seagrass as a packing material for their wares, collecting and drying the Posidonia from the Venetian lagoon. In response to this history, Vessel created over a hundred pieces of ceramics from local clay, dug from the land of Aegina, and decorated with images of seagrass life cycles and environmental messages. These vessels were shipped to Venice packed in our local seagrass, in crates built from recycled materials, to be displayed and returned, as a single, circular artwork.

The installation also includes seagrass materials prepared for architectural use, mixed with clay, lime, and cement binders, to form insulation and structural elements, which we have developed for our own use, and to share.

Team: Navine G. Dossos, James Bridle, Alisa Vincentelli, Alessandro Vincentelli, Danae Tsakona, and Vessel comrades.

This work was made possible by over a hundred individual donors, to whom we are incredibly grateful. We also received notable support from the Argosaronic Environment Foundation, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and Hito Steyel.