Project Highlights

The work was a commission for the first Special Projects, Applied Arts Pavilion, a collaboration between the V&A and La Biennale di Venezia. Taking as its starting point the 150th anniversary of the V&A’s foundational Convention for Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of Art for the Benefit of Museums of all Countries, this international exhibition was an extremely ambitious effort to consider the implications of digital technologies for cultural heritage. The debates it initiated resulted in the V&A’s major initiative, The Reproduction of Art and Cultural Heritage (ReACH), launched at UNESCO in 2017. This set out to create guidelines for how to reproduce, store and share works of art and culture heritage today, culminating in the ReACH Declaration on 8 December 2017 (V&A 2017). While A World of Fragile Parts was generally important, Infractus also proved to be specifically significant for the V&A as an institution: its highlighting of the imminent demolition of Robin Hood Gardens set the museum on a path of travel that led it to acquire a threestorey section of the estate for preservation purposes. This was then exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia, 16th International Architecture Exhibition in 2018.