An Underwater Art Project Off Miami Beach Imagines a Better World

The news about the environment, as you may know, is not good. President Donald Trump recently announced that he was erasing the finding that climate change endangers humans and the environment, meaning the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer control pollution. The glaciers on Greenland are melting faster and faster. Partly owing to climate risks, the professional worrywarts who maintain the Doomsday Clock just set it at 85 seconds to midnight, “the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.”

So, can the Reefline, a Florida eco-art nonprofit that is creating a seven-mile-long hybrid sculpture/coral reef stretching along the length of Miami Beach, save the world? No. But its creators, led by founder and cultural impresario Ximena Caminos, know that. Instead they hope to provide some inspiration with a vision for how artists, curators, and municipalities can collaborate on climate-forward art projects. I recently strapped on a pair of fins and a snorkel and a mask and swam out from South Beach to see the first installment of this ambitious project first hand, and dear reader, I can tell you, it’s very cool. 

The once-flourishing Florida Reef Tract, the organizers point out, is the world’s third-largest reef system, but it has been decimated by urban expansion and ecological degradation. Reefline’s master plan provides for several underwater sculptural reefs, overseen by architecture firm OMA. Phase one consists of a sculpture in the form of a traffic jam, Concrete Coral, by Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich. Phase two will include an artwork based on starfish, The Miami Reef Star, by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, and Heart of Okeanos, by Petroc Sesti, a giant sculpture in the shape of the heart of a blue whale. Barrier Modules & Super Structure, by architect Shohei Shigematsu and OMA, will serve as a breakwater for the overall project. 

Though it might look like a plant, coral is an animal that comes in a dizzying number of varieties and dates back nearly seven hundred million years. The ancient naturalist Pliny the Elder thought red coral was a plant, while some of his contemporaries said it was a mineral. Aristotle called it “neither quite one thing or another,” not plant or animal. The Polynesians described coral as the first creature to emerge from the primordial soup, giving rise to the gods and to humankind. While that might be interpreted symbolically, it’s no metaphor that all over the world, coral reefs provide shelter for small fish that provide protein for million. If they die out due to warming ocean temperatures, which they are doing in dismaying numbers, humanitarian crisis could result. In 2017, UNESCO’s World Heritage Center predicted that unless carbon emissions were reduced, “all 29 coral-containing World Heritage sites would cease to exist as functioning coral reef ecosystems by the end of this century.” Tick tock.  

Can Humankind Learn from Coral?

Courtesy of Reefline, I recently took a brief trip to Miami to check out the project. My first stop was to visit Colin Foord, director of science and co-founder of Coral Morphologic, at his lab in the city’s Allapattah neighborhood. For Miami Art Week in 2017, the team was commissioned to project animations based on coral onto the Faena Forum building (designed by Rem Koolhaas and the OMA team, led by Shohei Shigematsu). That planted the seeds for a collaboration with Ximena Caminos, now Reefline curator, who co-founded Faena Art (and was at one time wife of Argentine hotelier and real estate developer Alan Faena).

“Coral reefs are the first cities on the planet,” Foord said, “and coral are the first real estate developers.” 

During Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, the city commissioned Erlich to create Order of Importance, a site-specific installation with sixty-six life-size sand sculptures of cars and trucks in a traffic jam on the beach, his largest piece to date at that time. When Foord saw the piece, the car’s shapes reminded him of naturally occurring coral heads, and he suggested to Caminos that they could be reproduced on the ocean floor as a hybrid coral reef. (She was skeptical at first but soon came around.) A forest growing over a fossilized concrete traffic jam has a certain resonance, as the city’s traffic is notorious; U.S. News and World Report recently ranked Miami sixth-worst among American cities.

So Erlich created the cars out of concrete, and now there are twenty-two of them on the ocean floor, each with a hundred threaded holes in their surfaces; back at the lab, Foord and his team are placing small corals into tiny concrete pots that will be screwed into the holes on the cars, so there will eventually be some 2,200 corals “planted” on the automobiles.

“In line with the idea that the planet requires actions to restore balance, Concrete Coral seeks to positively convey that it is possible to recover and repair compromised environmental situations,” said Erlich in press materials. “The same ingenuity that has allowed us to develop marvelous inventions and the extraordinary capacity for innovation that now enables us to explore the vastness of the cosmos can also be applied to finding solutions for our planet.”

Beaches are a major income generator for the city, of course. Much of the city is man-made, developed by developers like Carl Fisher and John Collins (the latter’s name is on the main north-south drag that runs parallel to the beach). Unfortunately, ongoing projects to replenish Miami Beach’s sand smothered some ninety percent of the natural coral reefs there, Foord notes. Everything in Miami is about driving up real-estate values, he observes. And the corals provide secure real estate for small, tropical fish, which use it as a place to hide from larger ones. 

Tourists staying at hotels and Airbnbs that are just steps from the water might not realize that for locals, the sandy beaches are a difficult place to access, Foord told me. Reefline serves ten thousand students a year in more than a hundred Miami-Dade County public schools, ninety percent of whom come from low-income families. The city spreads across some thirty-six square miles and has limited public transit, so most kids the Reefline works with have never once stretched their toes out in the sand.

Foord quotes filmmaker Billy Corben, who has said that “The Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.” If Corben meant that to refer to the political contests that result from the city’s diversity, Foord calls Miami “a living lab for climate change,” one that sometimes floods even on sunny days. The corals that are thriving in the waters off Miami Beach are getting by in a post-human environment, and thus are especially hardy. 

In a way, Foord says, the Reefline’s highest purpose could be as a decoy. Eco-tourists who dive to see natural coral reefs inevitably harm them, from the carbon footprint of traveling to them in the first place to the polluting sunscreen divers may wear (mineral only formulas, please!) to accidents like stepping on or bumping into the reefs themselves. If casual tourists can be diverted to attractions like the Reefline, that in itself will be valuable.

After showing me the corals that are bound for the Reefline, which are visually pretty understated, Foord took me next door to see the corals he cultivates at Coral Morphologic’s quarters. It was, as he promised, like stepping into a blacklight poster—truly mind-blowing. Coral are the world’s most fluorescent life form, he said, which poses an evolutionary question: Why? Maybe, he muses, their color attracts humans to care for them. He’s been growing coral in his tanks for three decades. “We can learn from these libertarian communists,” he said, adding, “It’s less about us saving them than them saving us.” They’ve been building thriving communities for hundreds of millions of years, he said. 

That said, he’s not totally starry-eyed about them, noting that they will fight and kill each other over real estate, which sounds dreadfully familiar. 

A ‘Visual Trickster’ Takes to the Ocean Floor

My next stop was dinner with Caminos and her executive director, Brandi Reddick, who was previously cultural affairs manager for the City of Miami Beach. Dinner was early, as they were preparing to Zoom in to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, before dawn the next morning, and would meet with Miami’s mayor later in the day.

New York has the High Line, a site for public art elevated above the Chelsea neighborhood, Caminos noted, and Miami Beach is in the process of unveiling the Underline, the land below the city’s Metrorail, as a 10-mile park and public art destination. Now, the city has the Reefline, which will be some seven miles long, running the entire length of Miami Beach. The master plan commands a $48 million budget in total. The city’s residents voted to tax themselves to the tune of $5 million to support the project, Caminos proudly notes.

It was “an enormous challenge” to even fabricate the cars, which weigh between 28,000 and 32,000 pounds, with fabricators who work on construction projects unable to get the details right and those who make artworks unable to work at that size. Permitting was complicated, too, as it involved the Army Corps of Engineers, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Department of Environmental Protection, and Miami-Dade County. 

The installation, Caminos notes, “could be poetic, or catastrophic, or both. You could be seeing Pompeii.” Some skeptics, thinking them ugly, asked, “Why cars?”, but she explains that the piece turns a symbol of pollution into a symbol of transformation. (Skeptics might also note that concrete has a massive carbon footprint, but the material does provide a hospitable bed for coral to grow on.) 

Caminos invited ninety-year-old marine biologist Sylvia Earle to place the first coral onto a car back in December, shortly after the cars were placed on the sandy floor with the help of a gigantic barge. The first chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earle was Time Magazine’s first “Hero for the Planet” in 1998.

Caminos comes from an artistic family, and painted as a teenager, serving in artists’ ateliers and once winning a silver medal at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. But where she might earn silver as an artist, she said, she later felt confident she could earn a gold medal at identifying artistic potential in others. Sure enough, she recommended Erlich to represent Argentina at the 2001 Venice Biennale, where he presented Swimming Pool, which appears to be an above-ground pool but which is empty apart from a few inches of water at the top; from above, the people inside seem to be underwater, but they remain dry as a bone.

Erlich has had exhibitions at major institutions, including, in the last decade, solo shows at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Reviewing a show at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery for Art in America in 2011, in which the artist created enveloping, surreal sculptures based on passenger elevators, Charles Marshall Schultz observed that “Erlich seems to know what Alfred Hitchcock knew so well: the more mundane an object or situation, the greater its potential to become very strange,” which certainly applies to the Miami project equally well. Writing for ARTnews in 2017 about a survey at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, Lilly Wei dubbed the Argentine “a visual trickster of the highest order,” but one who “says that he is interested in illusion as a way to question modes of perception, not simply as trompe-l’oeil.”

The Reefline is already looking ahead to phase three, for which a jury composed of curators Carla Acevedo-Yates, Cecilia Alemani, Mami Kataoka, Inés Katzenstein, and Jessica Morgan recently arrived at a shortlist of three artists—Mexico City–born Tania Candiani, Oahu-born Kaili Chun, and Sydney-born Mel O’Callaghan—all of whom will travel to Miami Beach for a residency to refine their proposals. The one artist chosen for the Blue Arts Award will receive a $25,000 fee and a production budget topping out at $300,000.

The Reefline is not the only underwater art project, by far, and not even the only ecologically minded one. I had the opportunity to scuba dive in 2019 in Jamaica to see a project by Swiss artist Claudia Comte, supported by TBA-21, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Academy. There, in a fish sanctuary established by the Alligator Head Foundation, she had placed concrete sculptures in the form of cacti, upon which coral were to be placed. The cacti, obviously, are ironic when placed on the ocean floor, a bit like Erlich’s cars, but, less humorously, they also are inspired by a vision of widespread desertification resulting from climate change. 

If Erlich’s sculptures of polluting cars seem a bit on the nose for a project about the environment, know that there are also some pretty corny underwater ventures, like the Grenada Underwater Sculpture Park, at a Sandals resort, featuring sculptures by British artist and environmentalist Jason deCaires Taylor, where the imagery is a lot more cutesy. Taylor also unveiled an “underwater eco-museum” in the Mediterranean Sea off of Cannes, France, in 2021, that seems positively lowbrow by comparison. (To be fair, I haven’t seen these in person.) 

A Planned Scuba Dive Aborted

The plan was for me to join Foord and others on a boat that would take us to the site for a scuba dive the day after my visit to the coral lab so that I could get up close and personal with the cars, but alas, just as Foord was showing me around his lab, Divers Paradise, the company in charge, sent an email canceling the boat, citing anticipated conditions. A bummer, but Mother Nature will have her say. We adapted; a friend of Caminos’s lent me a pair of fins and a snorkel so I could swim the nearly eight hundred feet out from the beach. The sky was a bit overcast, but the waves were very, very mild. There’s no signage to alert beach goers to the project yet, but two orange buoys indicate the location of the sculptures below. 

So, after strapping on the gear, I began to make my way out into the cool water. Before it even got terribly deep, I was pretty sure I saw a shark. I was nearly spooked enough to do a U turn—okay, I may have turned around and started back for a second, if you must know—but I figured “he died doing what he loved” would be a fitting epitaph if I met a bloody, watery death. Moments later, when I would guess the water was about ten feet deep, I swam over a school of dozens of what I think were barracuda, which looked to be about four feet long and sported prominent underbites and yellow stripes along their backs. They paid me no mind. “Barracuda attacks are extremely rare,” a marine biologist told a local news outlet recently. “I mean, shark attacks are rare, but barracuda attacks make shark attacks look common.”

Buoys that are easy to spot from an elevated position on the beach, I soon found, are harder to locate when your eyes are just a few inches above the water. I kept wondering if I’d somehow gotten lost when I couldn’t spot the damn things, but convinced myself I probably just hadn’t swum far enough, and kept kicking. At long last, when I straightened up and looked around, I could spy the buoys a bit farther out, and swam some more. Fortunately, the fins do a lot of the work for you, so you can rest your arms behind your back as you go.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, a dark shape came into view on the sandy floor. A car! Twenty-two of them! Success! 

Apart from the possible shark and the maybe-barracuda, the water beneath me during most of my swim had been empty, but as Caminos had promised, above Erlich’s sculptures, countless little tropical fish swam about. Some of them approached, looking directly at me with seeming good-natured curiosity. The sun came out, and the colorful fish were resplendent in the spears of light that penetrated the surface. The plant life that has already set up shop on the cars drifts back and forth with the water’s currents. Having reached them, and feeling like I had plenty of energy left, I gently swam back and forth above the cars and idly floated, peering at the sculptures from the surface in the silence under the water, which was blessedly calm. Others were on the beach that morning, but none of them appeared eight hundred feet out, so I had a private viewing of Concrete Coral.  

I could easily see Caminos’s point about the ambiguity of Concrete Coral. The simple beauty of even a modest bit of nature is inspiring for a city-dweller like me, but at the same time, human life relegated to the sea floor could suggest disaster.

Back at his lab, Foord had suggested that Erlich’s underwater traffic jam could serve as a vision of the future, since soon enough, all of Miami Beach’s buildings will, like the cars, be submerged. He’s not exaggerating; scientists at the University of Miami say that the city will be sixty percent underwater by the year 2060.

“And then,” says Foord, “the coral will move in.”