The American environmental artist Agnes Denes has chosen the waters around the resilient city of Venice as the second site of her site-specific flag installation, “The Future is Fragile, Handle with Care". The flag was installed on a simple wooden pole by local fishermen during the Cinema Calleggiante (floating Cinema) Festival in the Venice lagoon. A film of the installation, narrated by Christopher Bailey, Arts and Health Lead at the World Health Organization, is released to mark UN Day and to coincide with the COP26 climate summit.

This installation follows a previous installation of the Flag at Tate Britain in London to mark the launch of a global Healing Arts campaign, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, to support improved mental, social and environmental health in the wake of the pandemic.

Denes's flag calls out for an urgent response, not only to COVID 19 but also to climate change (as she has been doing through her art over the past fifty years). With UN environmental agencies describing the virus as nature’s first "warning shot" to civilizations playing with fire, it is a stark reminder of the need for cooperation. The flag symbolizes the need for a collective response to these crises and how that can be transformed into a paradigm shift for a new vision of the world before it is too late. According to the artist, "Global dialogue and action are more crucial now than ever.”

The installation also marks the close of Healing Arts Venice, a six-month program in partnership with Ark Re-Imagined, the first ever pavilion of Iraq at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The pavilion explored the vernacular architecture, watercraft, and ecology of the Tigris-Euphrates river system – on the brink of extinction after decades of conflict, climate change and most recently COVID-19.

An AP of the Flag has been donated by the artist to The Future is Unwritten Artists Response Fund under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) to support artist-led projects which address the global health crisis. Among the projects being supported are cultural archiving programes with marginalized Yazidi and Marsh Arab communities in Iraq, the London-based Hospital Rooms charity which commissions artworks in secure psychiatric units; the Sudan Artists Fund; and a public arts programme in the Navajo Nation, Arizona.