NO TURNING BACK THE TIDES

hen, in early May, the jury of the 58th Venice Biennale awarded the Golden Lion to the Lithuania Pavilion—where the collective Neon Realism staged an opera on an artificial indoor beach, with performers singing about flooding it has seen in 50 years. From November 13 to 14, water levels rose to a height of 187 cm (73.6 in), forcing the Biennale along with other cultural institutions to close. Though no artworks were damaged in the Central Exhibition at the Arsenale or the Giardini, works in the outer pavilions in more low-lying locations were impacted. At the New Zealand Pavilion, hosted by the Institute of Marine Science, the storm surge brought down one of the enormous trees in the Palazzina Canonica. But it didn’t destroy the pair of artificial trees on site that were part of Dane Mitchell’s project (2019), in which a machine printed, read, and then broadcasted to other receiving towers (resembling pine trees) located around the city a list of more than three millions things—places, plants, animals, models of cameras—that have disappeared from the earth, in processes of extinction that are both human-caused and naturally occurring.