A big set up by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, consisting of twenty-two submerged marine-grade concrete automobiles on the ocean ground that appear to float in the direction of nowhere as the present flows by way of them, marks the primary part of the Reefline venture simply off the shores of Miami Seaside. This underwater sculpture park, positioned 21ft under the waves and 600ft from the seashore, is designed to resemble a hybrid reef that can help coral regeneration and marine biodiversity. Over the subsequent ten years, new artwork installations can be added till it reaches seven miles in size. The venture, supposed to show how artwork and science can drive actual options to local weather change, was developed by the cultural producer Ximena Caminos and includes a masterplan by the architect Shohei Shigematsu of the agency OMA.
The picture of an underwater site visitors jam is more likely to resonate with locals and guests alike, who’re recognized to bond over their frustrations with South Florida’s gridlock. Erlich’s sculptures had been fabricated utilizing 3D-printing know-how and are designed to turn into 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 automobile of damaging 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 the town of Miami Seaside 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 increase over a long time as organisms develop over the constructions and consolidate a resilient underwater panorama.
Throughout Miami Artwork Week (1-7 December), a floating marine studying centre is anchored on the web site, 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 will not be the one venture urging guests this week to consider marine ecology: on the close by truthful 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 Seaside, 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 venture 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 seashore. That piece sparked an thought in Caminos that it was not sufficient to create works that elevate environmental consciousness.
The artist Leandro Erlich (left) with the Reefline founder Ximena Caminos throughout one of many deployments to ship sculptures to the ocean ground 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 inventive director. “I mentioned to myself: how can I create one thing with that impression that isn’t disposable?”
On this means, Reefline gives an uncommon method to public artwork: the items on this park are topic to the desire of the ocean and designed to rework over time. “What makes this venture 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 can be written by the ocean.”
The venture—and Erlich’s conjuring of a submerged site visitors jam—is especially apt in a area that’s acutely in danger from world warming and sea-level rise. Coastal flooding in Miami Seaside particularly and South Florida on the whole is already a power and enormously expensive downside 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 necessary species, elkhorn and staghorn coral, had been declared functionally extinct within the state’s waters in analysis revealed within the journal Science in October. This bleak scenario has made the work being accomplished a number of miles inland from the Reefline web site particularly essential.
In an industrial warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood, blue lights illuminate rows of water tanks—enormous coral aquariums—that pulsate alongside air pumps and high-precision filters. LED lights re-create the blue spectrum that passes by way of the layers of the ocean, whereas small polyps open and near lure plankton inside tanks containing lots 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 can later be grafted onto the sculptures.
A concrete automotive is lowered into the water off South Seaside as a part of Erlich’s sculpture venture, 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 previous; the youngest, almost two. A person coral can develop 4 to eight inches in a 12 months. Foord provides: “In contrast to a traditional murals, right here the artwork begins whenever you submerge it. Nature completes the piece.”
The species of soppy coral being grown within the lab, that are quite common in Florida reefs, “develop like bushes, department out, filtering the water, absorbing the vitality of the waves, and creating habitat. They’re visually putting and significantly 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 below
The following deployments, beginning in 2026, will embrace Coronary heart of Okeanos by the London-based artist Petroc Sesti, a monumental sculpture based mostly on the center 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 Seaside-based architect Alberto Latorre. It would encompass 46 star-shaped modules that, as soon as put in, could have a diameter of almost 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 models that stack to adapt to the topography of the seabed and functionas breakwaters.
Along with its inventive and scientific options, Reefline has a civic and political dimension: in 2022, residents of Miami Seaside voted to offer $5m in financing for the venture by way of the town’s arts and tradition common obligation bond. The venture 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 date, in response to Caminos, Reefline has raised round $6m in all, which can permit the primary phases to maneuver ahead. Her aim is to achieve $30m. She hopes Reefline will present a mannequin that may be replicated in coastal cities all over the world, 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 Seaside
