During the Floating Art festival in the summer of 2018, Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen presented "Flooded Modernity" in the Vejle Fjord, a project that drew the attention of the international art world due to its sensational embodiment of the frustrations and failures of modernism. The artwork itself was a floating installation – a tilted 1:1-scale interpretation of one corner of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye – designed to give the impression that this historic building, a reference point of modern architecture, was sinking into the fjord.

Michalis Zacharias subsequently created a series of simulations of works by other contemporary artists, all bearing elements of ephemeral and meta/anti-monumental expression, along with aspects implying a failure to fulfil the concept of Utopia – a key theme of his recent projects. One of the works selected in this series was Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen's installation, along with Martin Kippenberger's "MOMAS" and Francis Alÿs's "Lada Kopeika Project". Recasting the artist as an historian, a theorist or even a journalist/archivist, this project eschews appropriation in favour of creating a commentary on the original works. With a focus on validating rather than questioning authorship, these simulations act as an agent of rejuvenation for works that leave only a data footprint – ones that Zacharias believes are important enough to be recompiled virtually and retained as archive entries.

The simulation of the work is an online, real-time evolution of Havsteen-Mikkelsen's floating installation as it appeared on location during the Floating Art festival. The simulation consists of low-poly 3D models of the sculpture itself and surrounding landscape, as assembled through JavaScript WebGL libraries (typically used for the development of online games). The installation perpetually reflects the conditions on location: synchronised with the local time and date of Vejle, it incorporates data concerning the duration of daylight along with sunrise and sunset hours, the approximate azimuth coordinates of the sun, and current weather conditions.

Part of the project involved communication with the artists themselves, as well as actively engaging them in the project as much as possible. After sending an initial e-mail introducing the idea and providing a link to a beta version of the simulation, Zacharias began a dialogue with Havsteen-Mikkelsen consisting of e-mails, Zoom calls and an exchange of ideas about the original work and its simulation.

This direct collaboration led to a joint presentation and exhibition of the project in Copenhagen and Athens, together with material related to the original work. The first exhibition was unveiled at Prospekt, Copenhagen, in late September 2023; the subsequent opening at MISC Athens is scheduled to take place on the exhibition’s closing date in Denmark, thereby linking the two events. This unorthodox crossover approach is a strong starting point for reimagining the ideas encapsulated by the original project – which, in its turn, was both a powerful commentary on a building constructed a century ago and an attempt to recontextualise it in the 21st century.

Although five years have passed, the momentum between the two artists appears to have been maintained. For Havsteen-Mikkelsen, the collaboration is a channel through which to share new thoughts on his work and reshape its meaning, while Zacharias is driven by a need to highlight and update historical/cultural data. For both Havsteen-Mikkelsen and Zacharias, this is a project of revisions and postscripts revolving around an older work, with the questions it prompted at the time – on utopia, modernism and the validity of this form of retrospection in its current guise – being asked anew in a fresh context. By taking the unusual step of emulating another artist’s work and forging an equally unusual partnership in its wake, the exhibition at MISC Athens revolves specifically around Havsteen-Mikkelsen's original work and the resulting archival material shared with Zacharias. This material has been recompiled, along with new elements from the pair’s collaboration, and is presented side by side with the simulation in an exhibition that strikes a balance between curatorial and artistic work.