Earlier this month, the people of Venice might have witnessed a strange spectacle: a field of grass floating down one of the city's famous canals.

It was the last leg of a journey that saw 10,000 critically endangered Australian grass plants transported, first as seeds, from the state of Victoria to a location in San Remo (north-west Italy), where they were planted and nurtured to maturity, and then on to Venice.

This botanical odyssey was in aid of Repair, the Australian contribution to this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The grasses, representing 65 species native to the Victorian Western Plains grasslands, will form part of a "living installation" inside the Australian pavilion, taking up approximately the same square-metreage as the average Australian house.

Architects Louise Wright (right) and Mauro Baracco (left), and artist Linda Tegg (centre). ( Supplied: Barraco+Wright/Rory Gardiner )

Repair's curators are Melbourne architects Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright (Baracco+Wright Architects), who worked in collaboration with photographer, performer, installation and video artist Linda Tegg.

On Skype from Venice earlier this month, the three expressed tentative delight that this months-long process — the seeds were sown in August 2017 — is nearing completion.

"It's still early stages," Barraco chuckles, "but in half an hour we'll be meeting with the electrician and then we'll start to be comfortable."

That meeting is to discuss the logistics of the exhibit's two other elements, entitled Skylight and Ground.

Skylight is a large scale lighting rig that will support 100 LEDs. They will mimic the sun's energy and keep the artificial grassland alive for the six months it is on display.

As well as being practical, Skylight is a bold statement from the curators about architecture's ongoing role in society. Wright thinks the artificial sustaining of life is likely to be one of the profession's main goals, considering the environmental moment we're in.

"I think [architecture] has to find a pathway along those lines, just to remain relevant," she says.

"I haven't come across architecture being presented in this way before," says Wright of the videos in Ground. ( Supplied: Barraco+Wright/Rory Gardiner )

Ground, meanwhile, is a series of experimental video works, co-produced by Tegg and collaborator David Fox, displaying 15 Australian architecture projects which all riff on the theme of repair. The videos will be projected onto 5-metre-high screens and will combine, with the grassland and Skylight, to "create an immersive experience," says Barraco.

"We really would like people to enter the room and feel, 'Wow! Here I am surrounded by this incredible environment.'"

The projects displayed in Ground were selected from 126 submissions received via a callout. Those chosen range from Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Pool upgrade, which sees the pool's offices meld beautifully into a grass-covered hillside, to Baracco and Wright's own Garden House, a dwelling-like structure in Western Port Victoria made almost entirely of translucent plastic — rendering 'outside' and 'inside' indistinguishable.

Each video was filmed at the location of the project in question, and presents two points of view across two channels. Tegg says: "[We're] looking at how the project is actually operating in its context, rather than isolating the building or the project as separate."

Wright explains: "I suppose the very simple, prosaic thing that we're trying to say is: as architects, what's our attitude to land use? We're occupying land so let's take a position here. Whereas, previously we [as a professional community] hardly have. We use land as white paper."

Repair was inspired by a 2014 installation that Tegg produced while on a residency at the State Library of Victoria. "I became curious to see what the library had replaced in its founding," she explains.

Tegg's 2014 work Grasslands was designed to remind its viewers of the pre-urban landscape. ( Supplied: Linda Tegg/Matthew Stanton )

The resulting work, Grasslands, saw Tegg implant patches of native grass all over the steps leading up to the library. "It's a very simple idea, to attempt to recreate what had been replaced and to bring it back on that site," she says.

The curatorial team for Repair are working with a very specific definition of the word — the Oxford English: "To restore (something damaged, fault, or worn) to a good condition." Their model of environmental repair is less about restoring a landscape to its original condition than making landscapes whole in new ways.

"It's not about going back or talking about something that's 'pristine' or 'perfect'," says Wright. "In architecture, when you repair a building, we use this strange term 'make good' … [I]t's about restoring an integrity."

Grasses from the Victorian Western Plains were selected for the project because the plant community is critically endangered, with a report by the Department of Sustainability and Environment suggesting that this plant community has declined by between 98 to 99 per cent from pre-European contact to now.

"[These grasses] were once widespread across South-East Victoria, but they're often on flat land and that's usually the first to get developed," says Wright. "Initially, they were decimated by livestock grazing, in the early 1800s. Then the flat volcanic, rich soil was used for farming. Once you [artificially] fertilise Australian soil, the Australian plants don't grow in that soil anymore. And then industry and urbanisation quickly took over."

Repair includes 65 species of grass, including native cornflower, weeping rice grass and common wheatgrass. ( Supplied: Barraco+Wright/Rory Gardiner )

"In north and west of Melbourne, a large area, still today the grasslands are being cleared for new housing estates."

The team hope that using plant communities that have been destroyed, in part, by architects of the past, will inspire the profession to consider the impact it has on the world.

"We want people … to really realise that you need a strong sense of care to keep all these things alive. Like the care we undertook in exporting the seeds, in growing them, in checking how they were going, in transporting, and now repotting them," says Baracco.

"Whereas with a bulldozer you can easily take all these plants, that have been there for thousands and thousands of years, [and] in just one second you can eradicate them."

While the final resting place of the grasses, once the exhibit is dismantled, is still to be confirmed, the ABC has been assured they will all be rehomed in Europe.

The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale runs from May 26 to November 25.