Walking on Water with Christo
By: Laura Rysman
Tags: Death, Artist, Art, Christo, Italy

Christo has no time to waste. On his 81st birthday, a few days before the opening of The Floating Piers, his monumental walkway across the waters of Lake Iseo in Italy, I was trailing the artist along with several of his assistants and a camera crew. We couldn’t keep up. He strode down a pier lined with dinghies for the project’s teams of divers, yelling, “We built this!” without turning back to face the scrambling group behind him. He reached the pier’s edge and swung his wiry frame around, launching into a description of the project’s engineering feats as we caught up with him.

Lake Iseo lies 60 miles northeast of Milan. The serene waters are encompassed by steep slopes of forest and the occasional rocky-faced mountain; small clusters of creamy yellow houses with terra cotta roofs dot the sparsely populated shores. The idyllic scene is the site of what may be Christo’s most magical installation, The Floating Piers — a 3.5-mile golden yellow path through the medieval streets of Sulzano on the shoreside, from where pedestrians walk across the water to Peschiera Maraglio on the peaked island of Monte Isola, and circle the tiny, castle-dotted island of San Paolo. Covered in dahlia yellow fabric, the path is the same sunshine color as the saffron robes of Buddhist monks; it brightens and darkens with the changing light, and as the walkway undulates with the waves.

The numinous effect of the walkway stands in stark contrast with the engineering and construction blitz that filled the lake with the sound of helicopters and motorboats in the lead-up to opening day. “Building this matrix — ” Christo pointed to the lattice of plastic cubes on which he stood, “is like building a highway.” He indicated the floating helicopter pad, the journalists’ dock, the boat wharf — all areas built just to support the construction of the final walkway — and counted off statistics of the total undertaking: 190 concrete anchors, each weighing five tons, installed by a team of six French divers, working at a depth of 300 feet. All of this cantilevered to a floating pontoon walkway that stretches across nearly two miles of water, piecing together 220,000 of the 20-inch cubes, and all of it to be recycled after July 3. Work began in November with a team of 50 Bulgarian installers, then came the divers, then, this month, 600 additional workers.

Christo, born in Bulgaria, was a political refugee in Paris at age 21 when he met the love of his life and fellow mononym Jeanne-Claude. (Formerly possessors of the surnames Javacheff and Denat de Guillebon, respectively.) They worked side by side for fifty years, creating an art form all their own: large-scale installations that exist at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and art, wresting a sublime experience from familiar landscapes and cityscapes.

Christo closed his eyes as he recounted their history: 22 projects rejected, 37 completed — in 1972, the giant Valley Curtain in Colorado; in 1985, the wrapping of Paris’s Pont Neuf, then Berlin’s Reichstag in 1995; in 2005, The Gates in Central Park; in 2009, Jeanne-Claude passed away. He opened his eyes. “Now we are here,” he said, the plastic pier creaking underfoot with the waves, “and I don’t have a lot of time.”

Christo had told his nephew and long-time operations manager, Vladimir Yavachev, that he was going to turn 80 in 2015, and he wanted to get something done quickly. Christo wanted to make people walk on water. He chose the height of summer for the installation — longer sunshine — and invoked the water, sky, and mountains as elements in his composition. He pronounced, his Bulgarian accent thickening, an emphatic prescription: “It’s not a project to look at, it’s a project to walk. Real walk, not virtual. Not virtual sun. Not virtual wet. The real walk.”

Despite the incredible engineering complexities of The Floating Piers, the project came together in less than two years — a breeze compared to the decades-long process of several prior projects. Christo first conceived of the idea in 1970, but settled on Lake Iseo for the site in 2014, long after having tried in Argentina and later Japan. It will last, like all of his installations, for just a brief moment — sixteen days, until July 3, free and open to the public 24 hours a day.

“These precious sixteen days, that’s because these projects of mine cannot be bought, cannot be owned, cannot be possessed,” Christo said, yelling into the wind as a helicopter transported building materials overhead. “They are projects of total freedom. Nobody can own these, because if you own something, it’s not free. This is why they are made for everybody. They exist only in this very precious time, and never again, like our life. We’re gone, and then we will never be again.”

Christo stared into the distance for a moment, strands of his white hair flapping in the wind, before speedboats of his young crewmembers caught his eye. They were on their way to install a rehearsal run of the fabric that would be sewn to the long walkway for opening day. They whooped and yelled “Happy birthday!” to Christo as the boats ferried them towards the San Paolo pier. He waved and smiled, seeing it was time to get work. Stepping into a speedboat, he took off towards his floating esplanade, yelling goodbye to us without turning around.