Slovak Republic

The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.
—Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, We Are “Nature” Defending Itself.

Civil protests have made history. We need these transformative stories with courageous heroes succeeding against all odds and creating a new myth. In Floating Arboretum, Oto Hudec works with an archive of stories, relating a collective effort of activists in preventing deforestation. The artist himself has participated in several protests. We believe Floating Arboretum can spark transformative imagination and inspire us in our daily lives.
Even the trees in the Giardini are threatened by climate change. Oto calls for their rescue and for that of endangered trees around the world. He contemplates an arboretum, a symbolic sanctuary for trees threatened by human expansion, and conceives a dystopian future of saving them in a (fictional) arboretum. Different timelines intersect here, protests against deforestation, the worldwide felling of trees, the climate crisis, and the imaginary dystopian rescue.
The trees are painted by Oto Hudec directly on the façade of the pavilion. The mural is accompanied by an installation of a boat with a sculpture of a seed of the Arolla pine, an endangered species native to Slovakia.