The Origin of Ark Re-imagined

Ark Re-imagined challenges popular images of the Ark based on European boat-building techniques far removed from the time and place of the Great Flood, when in the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, sea level in the Gulf rose 120 meters by around 8,000 BCE as part of a global climate event of unknown cause. Instead, the project envisions a Mesopotamian Ark, based on boat types and vernacular architectural forms that persisted on the Tigris and Euphrates river system in an unbroken tradition for many millennia until the conflicts and disruptions of the late 20th and early 21st century brought them close to extinction. This Ark is not a unique boat of monumental size that had never been built before, but a gathering of many ordinary vessels: a community bringing together what they already have into a structure of unity that would enable them to survive catastrophe.