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I recently returned from Venice, where late-autumn fog softens the edges of buildings and light thins into a quiet, silvery wash. The city’s fragile beauty, its slow, ongoing struggle with rising water, became a powerful lens through which I revisited an idea I have been exploring in my life’s work: Hope as a form of repair. Venice itself is a city born from rupture and survival, founded by refugees fleeing violence, built on unstable marshland, and engineered through improvisation and necessity. Its political and economic histories are marked by exploitation and colonial ties, even as its physical existence depends on the delicate labor of staying afloat. This complexity – where beauty is intertwined with danger, and innovation emerges from precariousness – makes Venice a compelling place to reflect on what repair asks of us, and how hope can be a form of repair and the driving force behind it. While I had already been working with this concept in my artistic and clinical practice, Venice offered an embodied vantage point. The city holds its wounds in plain sight. Salt lines creep up its walls, stones are worn by water and time; scaffolds and temporary walkways signal ongoing vulnerability. Venice survives through constant tending, and the rhythm shaped how I began to assemble this essay.
I offer things in fragments, each section a small tessera – a single piece of mosaic- shaped by hand and placed in relation to others. Repair is never linear. It is piece by piece.
During my time in the nearby city of Ravenna, I studied the art of mosaics, cutting stone, negotiating resistance, and enduring the hard labor and minor injuries of creation as I repeatedly smashed my fingers with a hammer and chisel. Each piece seemed to have its own will. There is no forcing a fragment into place; it must be aligned with care, attention, and a willingness to accept the imperfection of its maker. In two of my photographic series, Precious Scars (Ba