One degree removed : the last carnival of Venice

Abstract

Development, including urban and architectural, has been driven by the idea of progress aimed at economic and technological growth, which, in turn has been leaving waste in its wake. Waste has thus become the subjects of culture in the 21st century. Our daily life is supported by products that could be understood as waste on life-support, with expiration dates and packaging material that ensure a lengthy and repulsive death, leaving behind durable synthetic corpses. Products of our consumption tend to pile out of sight, contributing to cities and architectures of their own. The binary condition of masking our waste is essentially our embedded cultural flaw, whether through landfills or capped as parks, masking consciousness and ownership as well - our current unsustainable paradigm of growth. Venice will be the first major city to drown because of climate change.

It is a city in which experiences of culture, history and architecture are obsessively consumed by a population that vastly surpasses its own citizenry. I intervene in three physical and temporal scales, responding to this binary condition by manifesting its materiality, publicly - through choreography, celebration, and building. This is an alternative way to conceive architecture: Not in the service of progress but in the service of greater self-awareness. Without hoping for a wholesale utopian transformation but accepting various dimensions of our prospects. Each intervention is imagined for a city in which tourism drives the economy, and leaves waste in its wake - in a city caught in an unsustainable cycle of consumption. 1) The choreography of trash renders visible the geographical scale that comes with the displacement of waste through technological instruments and human labor.

2) The Carnival sets up a platform to reclaim the public ground, an orchestration of rising sea levels, time, and ownership. It recreates some of the city's most celebrated architecture as ephemera in an event that includes trash in all its inconvenient and uncomfortable presence overtime acclimates citizens to climate change. 3) Venice now, in the early 21st century produces waste above all else, this intervention updates the architectural "monument" to function as a beacon of our Anthropocene.