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THE AUCTION OF VENICE
Questions Collective’s interactive installation The Auction of Venice is a piece proposing a world beyond the accounting paradigm. Ever since the invention of balanced bookkeeping, life and the world have been valued in monetary units and categorized as divisions of credit and debit moving towards equilibrium. But you cannot balance an ocean with a dolphin orphanage. And now, Venice—the birthplace of balanced bookkeeping—is sinking as a result of climate change. By symbolically putting the city up for sale, we want to put an end to a system at the core of humanity’s harmful behaviour.
We were proudly selected by our mentor, designer Jerszy Seymour, to present this work at the Forecast Forum 2019 in Berlin in the category An Activism In Design. In this residency we developed a performative immersive installation in which we, as the company Liquid Futures, presented our plan to sell Venice. In this initial ceremony, the audience was offered an opportunity to invest in a future beyond debit and credit. This was Liquid Future’s Initial Coin Offering: the day on which our first cryptocoin was mined.
“We at Liquid Futures believe in bodily values, that is why we will process this blockchain by moving our bodies. Because we are not only looking for financial stakeholders but also in people with skin in the game."
Photos on this page by Camille Blake, ©Forecast Forum, Radialsystem, 2019.