Soap from the Venetian Soap Workshop. Photo by Norbert Tukaj

The following was presented for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale (produced in collaboration with Thuy Le, Antonio Moya-Latorre and Indrani Saha. Special thanks to Gediminas Urbonas and Nomeda Urbonas)

Tourism is the lifeblood and intoxicant of Venice. Like many other islands, Venice thrives on the foot traffic that erodes the ground beneath it.

The excessive production of comestibles and collectibles, as well as their assumed disposability, have left their mark on the city as material strata to mix with and become sediment. The Venetian canals are as enticing from a distance as they are putrid upon direct contact.

In several years time, the material culture of Venice’s touristic peak in the 21st century will be studied as an era of archaeological inquiry. The inseparability of the precious and the disposed will be as beguiling as that between Nature and Culture, which has only until this century made itself frightfully apparent.

For the 2018 Venice Biennale, we will produce objects born of this inseparability, in the form of commodities familiar to the consumptive traveler. The dissonance captured in these objects is only a sample of the larger conflict bubbling under the surface of Venice and other sites plagued by touristic erosion.