was closed in the 1980’s. To distract from the real reasons why the incinerator was shut down, Vesta held an architectural competition to create a recreation centre for its employees in place of the incinerator. The winning design was never actualized and only in 2003 was the derelict incinerator destroyed. The island now remains empty with the exception of a sorting operation on the south side and a colony of rabbits. Directly opposite is the famous island of Murano where factories pump out world famous glassware of all colours and qualities. If you were to continue past this island and along the same compass line farther northeast, you would find another island of glass that has re- cently been added to the constellation: Santa Cristina, a private island owned by the crystal tycoon Swarovski. In light of all this glass glistening in the Venetian Lagoon, Robert Smithson’s Island of Broken Glass would seem to be right at home. However while glass is one of Venice’s greatest exports, plastic water bottles might be its greatest import. One could joke that Venice is sinking due to all the bottled water shipped into the lagoon for tour- ist consumption. With a ratio of 12,000,000 visitors to a dwindling 60,000 inhabitants, the strongest presence in Venice is not Renais- sance art but the tourists clicking photos where Madonna shot her Like a Virgin video, or the Biennale tourist searching for a temporary pavilion. For years Venetians have expressed concern about Venice’s fate as an Italian theme park (Muntadas’ exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale formalised this worry). But if the increase in tourism makes sense on a global scale, the increase in the bottled water market does not. Originally marketed as a luxury item, bottled water reached the status of the everyday while the world was in an economic recession. Leading this market trend, Italy consumes more bottled water per capita than any other country in the world. Extreme tourism in Venice exacerbates this to excessive proportions. Plastic water bottles sully every part of the entire city: floating in canals, flowing out of garbage bins, and flooding San Marco’s square. In one rotation around San Marco collecting discarded bottles, I easily filled more than two 50 litre bags. Surprisingly, Venice does not recycle. Of all Italo Calvino’s descriptions of Venice in Invisible Cities , Procopia and Leonia are the cities growing more and more visible. Made in the footprint of Smithson’s Map of Clear Broken Glass (Atlantis) , Island of Discarded Plastic (Leonia) reflects its environment, literally and conceptually. A three metre island that floats in the lagoon between the island of San Servolo and the Giardini, the work is solely com- posed of glue and tourist water bottles collected from a selection of sites around Venice. The island will float with the tides for the dura- tion of the 10th Biennale for Architecture, perhaps meeting the same fate as Atlantis—or reflecting the future of Venice. D
5
Along with Glue Pour which was actually performed in Vancouver, Is- land of Broken Glass held a central role in the configuration of the show and the catalogue. A request to work in Venice—a mythological city that is both sinking and the source for world renowned glass crafts- manship— immediately brought this piece to the surface of my mind. However, a simple execution of Smithson’s original plan appeared problematic for two reasons: first, the site had changed locations, and second, a direct recreation of the work is more of a museological issue (like the Dia reconstruction) than an artistic concern. Finally, if we were to seriously consider the aspect of site-specificity, not only would the geographical location need to be considered, so would the temporal concerns arising 30 years later. Each decade Venice is flooded a little bit more. While the acqua alta of 1966 brought this fact to international attention, the precariousness of Venice has always existed. Many of Venice’s islands have come and gone over its long history. The most recent addition to the Venetian Lagoon is an unnamed island at the western tip of Giudecca. This tri- angular-shaped island doesn’t appear on many maps, and is particu- larly absent from tourist maps of Venice. Appearing in the 1950s, it was created by the waste disposal organization Vesta as the location to collect and incinerate Venetian garbage. However, with the discovery that the building material, asbestos, was cancerous, the incinerator
Island of Discarded Plastic (Leonia) was made during the artLAB residency and exhibited in Fatti e Finzioni, curated by Irene Calderoni.
on site review 17
51
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator