page_title: Swoon (artist)
section_title: Swimming Cities of Serenissima, 2009
hierarchical_section_title: Swoon (artist) / Career / Swimming Cities of Serenissima, 2009
caption_attribution_description: English: Junk rafts in Venice
context_page_description: Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist and is widely known as one of the first women to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. Caledonia took to the streets of New York while attending the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn in 1999, pasting her paper portraits to the sides of buildings with the goal of making art and the public space of the city more accessible.
  Her work has become known for marrying the whimsical to the grounded, often weaving in slivers of fairy-tales, scraps of myth, and a recurring motif of the sacred feminine. Tendrils of her own family history—and a legacy of her parents’ struggles with addiction and substance abuse—recur throughout.
  While much of Swoon's art plays with the fantastical, there is also a strong element of realism. This can be seen in her myriad social endeavors, including a long-term community revitalization project in Braddock, Pennsylvania and her efforts to build earthquake-resistant homes in Haiti through Konbit Shelter. Her non-profit, the Heliotrope Foundation, was created in order to further support these ventures.
context_section_description: Swoon and a crew of 30 crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale with the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, a performance project similar to the Miss Rockaway Armada and the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea. The crew sailed from Slovenia in rafts made of containers-worth of New York City garbage, as well as one raft made from material scrapped along the Slovenian coast. The project stopped at various points on the way to meet locals, collect artifacts for their on-board "cabinet of curiosities" and to prepare for the culminating performance entitled The Clutchess of Cuckoo.
  The crew included members from the anarchist bicycle-art group Black Label Bike Club, Chicken John, artists Iris Lasson and Arielle Bier, other artists, activists, and musicians. They gathered on the Slovenian coast on April 2009. Slovenian officials at first held the containers, from New York, in customs, not believing they were full of trash.
  The rafts had eating, cooking, and sleeping quarters. Once in the Venice Lagoon, the rafts' company performed throughout Venice nightly and docked at Certosa Island. For example, they played on the Grand Canal at 3:00 a.m. When the group ran out of money, they used the shipping containers as housing.
caption: Swimming Cities of Serenissima
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