A big set up by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, consisting of twenty-two submerged marine-grade concrete automobiles on the ocean flooring that appear to float in direction of nowhere as the present flows by them, marks the primary section of the Reefline mission simply off the shores of Miami Seashore. This underwater sculpture park, positioned 21ft under the waves and 600ft from the seaside, is designed to resemble a hybrid reef that may help coral regeneration and marine biodiversity. Over the following ten years, new artwork installations will probably be added till it reaches seven miles in size. The mission, supposed to exhibit how artwork and science can drive actual options to local weather change, was developed by the cultural producer Ximena Caminos and encompasses a masterplan by the architect Shohei Shigematsu of the agency OMA.
The picture of an underwater site visitors jam is prone to resonate with locals and guests alike, who’re identified to bond over their frustrations with South Florida’s gridlock. Erlich’s sculptures have been fabricated utilizing 3D-printing expertise and are designed to grow to be coated by dwell corals. Famend worldwide for sculptures and installations that disorient viewers with trompe l’oeil results and optical illusions, the artist discovered an surprising vanishing level whereas engaged on Concrete Coral (2025).
“Underwater, this site visitors jam colonised by nature seems to be like a submerged civilisation from the previous. It has one thing of the parable of Atlantis in it,” Erlich tells The Artwork Newspaper. “This work transforms a car of detrimental impression into one thing that now serves nature.”
Guests can attain the set up by swimming, diving, snorkelling, kayaking or utilizing electrical paddleboards designed by BMW and SipaBoards. The initiative—developed by the BlueLab Preservation Society in partnership with town of Miami Seashore and a big crew of biologists, engineers and artists—is meant as each a novel public artwork attraction and long-term ecological infrastructure: it is going to develop over a long time as organisms develop over the buildings and consolidate a resilient underwater panorama.
Throughout Miami Artwork Week (1-7 December), a floating marine studying centre is anchored on the website, the place scientists and artists welcome the general public to discover the challenges of coral restoration and encourage them to plant their personal coral. Reefline just isn’t the one mission urging guests this week to consider marine ecology: on the close by honest Untitled Artwork, the curator Allison Glenn has organised a special-projects part across the theme of water as each a metaphor and an art-making materials.
Parking artwork underwater
It took a 157ft-long development barge, heavy-lift cranes and impeccable logistics to submerge Erlich’s 22 automobiles off the coast of Miami Seashore, between 4th and fifth Streets, in late October. Inside minutes of being put in, fish started swimming curiously across the automobiles’ hole shells.
“The Reefline mission may be very particular to Miami,” Erlich says. “You may have museums, galleries or festivals in any metropolis on this planet, however not all of them have a sea the place you possibly can plant corals.”
The brand new work reimagines Order of Significance, the set up that Erlich introduced throughout Miami Artwork Week in 2019, which consisted of 66 life-size sculptures of automobiles and vehicles coated in sand, organized in an unsettling site visitors jam on the seaside. That piece sparked an thought in Caminos that it was not sufficient to create works that increase environmental consciousness.
The artist Leandro Erlich (left) with the Reefline founder Ximena Caminos throughout one of many deployments to ship sculptures to the ocean flooring Picture: Veronica Ruiz
“Once we needed to dismantle that set up, it broke my coronary heart, and the $400,000 we spent went down the drain,” recollects Caminos, Reefline’s founder and creative director. “I mentioned to myself: how can I create one thing with that impression that isn’t disposable?”
On this manner, Reefline affords an uncommon method to public artwork: the items on this park are topic to the desire of the ocean and designed to remodel over time. “What makes this mission distinctive is the intersection of worlds: artwork, science, biodiversity, leisure and group,” Caminos says. “This hall will proceed to develop for years. Its true kind will probably be written by the ocean.”
The mission—and Erlich’s conjuring of a submerged site visitors jam—is especially apt in a area that’s acutely in danger from international warming and sea-level rise. Coastal flooding in Miami Seashore particularly and South Florida on the whole is already a persistent and enormously pricey drawback that’s solely going to worsen.
Contained in the coral studio
An ocean heatwave in 2023 has decimated an enormous share of Florida’s coral reefs; two vital species, elkhorn and staghorn coral, have been declared functionally extinct within the state’s waters in analysis printed within the journal Science in October. This bleak scenario has made the work being achieved a couple of miles inland from the Reefline website particularly essential.
In an industrial warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood, blue lights illuminate rows of water tanks—big coral aquariums—that pulsate alongside air pumps and high-precision filters. LED lights re-create the blue spectrum that passes by the layers of the ocean, whereas small polyps open and near entice plankton inside tanks containing tons of of gallons of water. The Reefline coral lab is the place the marine biologist and artist Colin Foord, the co-founder of Coral Morphologic, cultivates the octocoral species that may later be grafted onto the sculptures.
A concrete automotive is lowered into the water off South Seashore as a part of Erlich’s sculpture mission, the primary piece within the Reefline sculpture park Picture: Nico Munley
“Every automotive will get 100 corals. It’s 22 automobiles, so we’re speaking about 2,200 corals in complete,” Foord tells The Artwork Newspaper. The oldest fragments within the lab are round eight months outdated; the youngest, practically two. A person coral can develop 4 to eight inches in a yr. Foord provides: “Not like a traditional murals, right here the artwork begins if you submerge it. Nature completes the piece.”
The species of sentimental coral being grown within the lab, that are quite common in Florida reefs, “develop like bushes, department out, filtering the water, absorbing the power of the waves, and creating habitat. They’re visually hanging and a lot better for fish refuge,” he says. The corals will want between three and 5 years to totally “bloom” on the automotive our bodies.
Extra artwork going underneath
The subsequent deployments, beginning in 2026, will embody Coronary heart of Okeanos by the London-based artist Petroc Sesti, a monumental sculpture based mostly on the guts of a blue whale that represents a symbolic providing to the Greek Titan god of the oceans. Additionally within the pipeline is The Miami Reef Star by the Puerto Rico-born, Miami-based artist Carlos Betancourt and the Miami Seashore-based architect Alberto Latorre. It can encompass 46 star-shaped modules that, as soon as put in, may have a diameter of practically 90ft and be seen from planes flying over the world. OMA, the structure agency co-founded by Rem Koolhaas that’s behind Reefline’s masterplan, can also be designing geometric modular items that stack to adapt to the topography of the seabed and functionas breakwaters.
Along with its creative and scientific options, Reefline has a civic and political dimension: in 2022, residents of Miami Seashore voted to offer $5m in financing for the mission by town’s arts and tradition normal obligation bond. The mission has additionally obtained help from the John S. and James L. Knight Basis, the Blavatnik Household Basis, the singer Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio, Michele and Don Soffer, Karla and Dylan Dascal and others within the Star Founding Members programme.
To this point, in response to Caminos, Reefline has raised round $6m in all, which can enable the primary phases to maneuver ahead. Her purpose is to succeed in $30m. She hopes Reefline will present a mannequin that may be replicated in coastal cities world wide, and that empowers future generations to drive collective motion. She provides: “If we proceed to behave this manner, we’re going to crash.”
Reefline, at 4th Road, Miami Seashore
