Venice's Grand Canal Turns Fluorescent Green

Venice, now available in fluorescent green

The 34th Venice Biennale was opening in a year already overflowing with political protest, cultural upheaval and arguments over what art was supposed to be.

Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu had come to Venice without an official invitation to participate in the Biennale.

He nevertheless found himself a rather large canvas.

The Grand Canal.

On the morning of 19 June, García Uriburu boarded a gondola and released fluorescein into the water.

The effect was difficult to miss.

A long stretch of Venice's normally muted green-grey canal became intensely fluorescent, transforming one of the world's most recognizable urban landscapes into an enormous temporary artwork.

The substance had been chosen deliberately. Museum and Biennale histories describe it as non-toxic and environmentally harmless in the way it was used. The colour spread through the canal and remained strikingly visible for hours before the tide gradually carried it away.

The intervention was not an officially commissioned Biennale work. García Uriburu used the unauthorized action to challenge conventional boundaries between painting, landscape and public space, while drawing attention to humanity's relationship with nature.

Argentina's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes later described the work as an early landmark of performance, conceptual and environmental art. The Metropolitan Museum likewise identifies García Uriburu as a pioneer of ecological art.

Venetians encountering the spectacle did not initially receive an explanatory wall label.

For a time, there was simply a famous canal in an impossible colour.

The transformation lasted only hours.

The photographs lasted considerably longer.