A Trap for Greta is a performative sculpture by Jeremy Chen. This artwork in Giardini Marinaressa (Levante) is part of the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures – Beyond Boundaries exhibition. Chen activates the sculpture when he attaches a 70 kg block of ice to the spring mechanism on the bricola structure. When the ice block completely melts away, a new ice block is eventually attached to repeat the Sisyphean process. The artist produced ice blocks from June to November 2024 and performed with the sculpture as announced.

The next time ice blocks will be attached to the sculpture will occur on:

• Friday, 22nd of November, from 14:00 to 17:00
  Saturday, 23rd of November from 14:00 to 17:00

In the summer of 2023, a UNESCO committee recommended putting Venice on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites. But in autumn 2023, Venice avoided addition to this list for now. From April to November 2024, the artist brings this project to Venice and the European Cultural Centre knowing the fragility of the Veneto and hoping for its resiliency and preservation.

A Trap for Greta is a literal and metaphorical personal structure for the artist to examine and demonstrate his uselessness and paralysis while entangled in unsustainable habits and structures that propel all of us into a future collapse that is beyond boundaries. This is a trap of his own device, but it is useless in catching anything but him. He becomes frozen in the structure repeating useless actions. A Trap for Greta calls us to imagine and invent new structures, habits, and ways of caring for ourselves and all others as we face our current circumstances together.