'Metamorphōsēs' presents water collected from the Venice Lagoon inside a glass perfume bottle. The material itself remains unchanged, yet the container transforms how it is perceived: ordinary tidal water becomes precious, intimate and desirable. Referencing Ovid’s Metamorphoses and echoing Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the work explores transformation through image, memory, desire and representation. Venice appears both as a physical place and as an imagined, repeatedly reconstructed image. Developed within Venice Tap Water, the work reflects on how natural resources, places and identities are packaged, consumed and assigned value through the forms that contain and represent them.

Lorenza Cossutta, Marco Capovilla and Giacomo S. Pistolato collaborate through Venice Tap Water, a Venice-based environmental, cultural and artistic project founded in 2019. Their practice combines conceptual art, field research and public engagement to explore water, consumption, tourism and environmental responsibility. Using everyday objects, lagoon materials and scientific data, they investigate how water is valued, represented and packaged and sold, and how Venice's fragile relationship with its lagoon can reveal wider ecological tensions. In 2026 the collective was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and Wells Art Contemporary.