Welcome to the Floating Monument.
Site: Saronic Gulf, Greece
Critics: Elia Zenghelis, Violette de la Selle
The Floating Monument is a traveling museum of facsimiles that brings seasonal exhibitions to archaeological sites around the Saronic Gulf. The museum of facsimiles challenges the narrative of a continuous Greek culture and offers multiple narratives of Greek history through architectural fragments. The Floating Monument resists the package tour experience that prescribes a fixed schedule and narrative. It invites professionals to reconstruct layers of history and seasonal tourists to see the multiplicity of architectural fragments in the context of their sublime landscape. It laments the lost artifacts and lost history, but celebrates the reproducibility of work of art with technology.
As part of the archipelago, the Floating Monument travels around the Saronic Gulf, simultaneously collecting from and offering to other islands. Piraeus and Agios Georgios provide energy, water, waste treatment and other infrastructures for the Floating Monument. The Floating Monument offers a destination site and a dialog between landscape and history to other islands.
Policy and tourism
From 1948 to 1952, the United States invested $700 million, or $6.7 billion in today’s currency, into Greece through the Marshall Plan. Suspicion of how the Greek elite was handling the funds compelled Washington to pressure the state into establishing the Hellenic Tourism Organization that oversees tourism development. The Americans, along with a handful of enlightened Greeks, believed that tourism could be the cornerstone of Greece’s postwar development model.
Policy making in the Greek State and the proliferation of a singular cultural identity has since become a proxy of western interests. The Marshall Plan led to tourism being the means to maintain and flatten the Classical image of Greek history.
Facsimiles
There is no such thing as authenticity, especially on the Greek mass tourism sites. Later layers of constructions were stripped off in favor of the Classical period.
If a culture wants to build a museum that archives fragments of its history, it should always be under construction. It should reconstruct and reveal different layers of history.
Site Map
Interior View
Circulation Diagram
Floor Plans
Section
Unrolled Section