Emma-Janet Fraser

By the year 2150 it is predicted that the waters of the venetian lagoon will have risen enough to flood the city of Venice. Rising waters across the planet will threaten cities globally. Alongside the threat of physical drowning we are also and not insignificantly being submersed and overwhelmed by the hoards of relics, artefacts and icons that our cultures hold most valuable. We generally deem a thing to be valuable because of its unique-ness, but we have so many precious and ‘unique’ artefacts at this point the one-off quality has been completely lost. The project acts a salvage operation to rescue and preserve icons not only from the geographical threat of their physical contexts but from their arguably more threatening cultural dilution.

The proposal begins in the midst of the salvage operation where the construction of a new landscape of our collected and collective history begins.