Swoon on “The Swimming Cities of Serenissima”

Arrested Motion has an interview with Swoon about her latest boat project, “The Swimming Cities of Serenissima”, which will launch this May. Swoon and her team will launch their homemade crafts from Slovenia and travel all the way to Venice just in time for The Venice Biennale. With any luck, I’ll be in Venice for their arrival, so I’ll be blogging and twitter that, but in the mean time, Arrested Motion is where it is at. Here’s a short excerpt from their interview with Swoon:

AM: Are there any particular themes or issues that you’re looking to explore with this journey?

Swoon: There are many, but just to pull out a thread, I have always felt that these boats are an expression of joy and wonder, while at the same time being a map of anxiety.

We are making a cabinet of wonders by collecting things we find along the way: seeds, bones, flowers, stories – all manner of things. This impulse is about observing, collecting and sharing beautiful things in the world around us, but there is also an element of the impulse to preserve these things and to pack your whole life onto a couple of hand-made rafts and set sail, which is about the feeling that the way we are living is coming apart at the seams, is destroying the world around us and will not last. These boats are not to be taken as a literal solution, but in the way that art distills a language from our imaginations and creates images that speak to us above and below the level of our spoken language, we are addressing these issues in our form.

Read the rest at Arrested Motion.