Drowning Cities: A Voyage to Venice on Junk Art Rafts

In the summer of 2009 street artist Swoon and a crew of thirty collaborators assembled three sculputural art rafts out of junk and salvage and sailed them from Slovenia, across the Adriatic Sea to Venice. These are field notes from the final leg of the journey into Venice. The 'Swimming Cities of the Serenissima' succeeded where Napoleon and many others had failed: executing a sea invasion of Venice's famed Arsenale, once its warship-building heart, now site of the infamous Biennale art show. Like hallucinatory chunks of land floating out to sea, the Swimming Cities fleet embodied the idea that "anything that can be imagined can be built".