Watermarked

Abstract

Positioned somewhere between fiction and critical reflection, this piece draws inspiration, first, from Gonzalez-Foerster's 2008 Tate Turbine Hall installation TH.2058. In this she speculated upon London being subject over years to ceaseless rain and flooding. Projecting fifty years into the future, the Turbine Hall was turned into a Noah's Ark-style sanctuary and an archive of key cultural artefacts of western civilisation. Meanwhile, Alfred Jaar's installation Venezia Venezia for the Venice Biennale in 2013, presented an exact scale model replica of the Biennale's Giardini galleries complex, a lush neighbourhood of national pavilions laid out neatly like foreign embassies in a formation that exudes early 20th century western colonialist power. Jaar's Giardini model lies sunken in a large square pool of murky green Venetian canal water, so there is no initial indication of the Biennale complex, only a deceptive calm. After a while a clunking mechanism kicks in and the gardens slowly emerge. They remain for approximately half a minute before receding again, leaving behind but a few air bubbles floating on the surface. Jaar's installation represents a critical engagement with the Biennale as highly-influential, long-standing global art-world event and the city of Venice as a whole, but also with the notion of a declining western civilisation.Watermarked speculates playfully on the city of Venice sinking in the year 2017. As the Giardini site sinks into the lagoon for the very last time, traditional kitsch postcards of the city float to the surface, their waterlogged images still recognisable. In a sense the postcard encapsulates the state of the city: it is an anachronism, a ‘ruinous artefact’ clung to by visitors as an essential feature of a romantic ideal. But it also serves crucially as the comparative barometer for the tourist of a mediated beauty. Retrieved from the lagoon, the flipside of the postcards reveal a text whose style deliberately runs against the grain of communication clichés and perhaps amounts to something like a ‘last post’ from a sinking city.