Towards the “sunken” world: moving below the surface
Tags: Marine, Museum, Underwater

Welcome to the submerged land on Earth that has been largely out of sight to terrestrial beings. Over the millennia, human development has overtaken the ground above sea level, lined with shores that divide the occupied surface and the sunken depths.

the two with Located off the coast of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean is an underwater museum, with all its sculptures 50 feet below water.

here is an entire submerged world hidden just below sea level, largely out of sight to terrestrial beings today. The Earth’s shores are lined with sunken cities, flooded crypts, drowned forests, and submerged structures that have been lost underwater over the millennia, overtaken by nature or human development.

Rising sea levels and flooding caused by earthquakes, landslides, changing tides, melting glaciers, or manmade dams have wiped entire villages off the map. And sometimes, when the water recedes, these submerged cities and landscapes reemerge from the depths, an eerie glimpse at the invisible sunken world.

A striking reminder of human trajectory

Completely submerged under the Atlantic Ocean, Jason deCaires Taylor’s Museo Atlántico is a bit of irony on the interplay between man and nature. It is situated off the coast of the Spanish island of Lanzarote, the easternmost of the Canary Islands, the first underwater art museum in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean.

The phase consists of different groups with more than 300 individual sculptures.

The Raft of Lampedusa, a reference to the refugee crisis, carries 13 personnel towards an unknown future. It draws from Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa that casts the vain hope of shipwrecked sailors. Raft after raft of refugees fades into the wave of Mediterranean. Even if they see the rescue vessel on the horizon, they are abandoned to the uncertainty of fate.

The Rubicon portrays a crowd of 35 people walking foreward, while unaware that they are heading to a wall, the point of no return. They look down at their phones, wandering in a dreamlike state. Blindness. A recurrent theme in Taylor’s work. That we are sleepwalking towards an end, unable to take stock of our impact on the surrounding, and therefore our own survival.

The wall stretches like a monument of absurdity in the middle of a vast fluid space, bypassed in any direction. The notion of ownership obscures, as rights and territories in their terms are merely relevant in natural world. The segregation, conceptual walls and defined boundaries, the human-nature dichotomy, all melt into absurdity when we are prone to the oblivion of our position in an integral living system by disintegrating parts from the whole.

The Human Gyre consists of hundreds of life-size human figures in a gyre. The piece embodies our relative fragility encountering the ocean’s cycle, the carrier of our subsistence that regulates and provides the source for millions of lives.

The sculptures convey a message on our interaction with ocean. Several hybrid forms, half human-half cactus for example, pictures a potential path forward, the merging of man and nature on the coevolving basis.

Taylor also built artificial reefs where microorganisms can attach to, which constructs the habitat and attracts more coral growth. The concrete used to build the sculptures is neutral in pH and nontoxic to marine life, through which the purpose is to bring back the biodiversity that once prospered.

In essence the museum itself is an evolving ecosystem that change over time with its environment, just as nature changes over time by interacting with its inhabitants.