One of the most spectacular projects ever realised by Christo and Jeanne-Claude is Surrounded Islands (1980-1983). Changing the actual face of the natural environment, the artist duo created a delicate symbiotic connection between art, city, and nature, without damaging the nature in any way. 

11 man-made islands in the Greater Miami region, which were mainly being misused for dumping garbage, were surrounded with 60 hectares of pink woven polypropylene fabric. The color was considered a poetic companion to the tropical vegetation of the uninhabited grassy islands, the light of the Miami sky, and the colors of the surrounding water.

A team of lawyers, a marine engineer, consulting engineers, a building contractor, a marine biologist, an ornithologist, and an expert on mammals worked together with Christo and Jeanne-Claude to prepare the project. 40 tons of garbage was removed and permits had to be secured from numerous authorities. Christo and Jeanne-Claude described the myriad of elements that brought their projects to life as integral to the artwork itself. 

Surrounded Islands is as magnetic and relevant today as it ever was. The intriguing pink shapes are suggesting new ways of seeing and relating to the familiar. This is truly needed if we are to change the way we inhabit our planet.

Venezuelan artist Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020) dedicated over eighty years of her extensive oeuvre to the investigation of universality and the connections that exist between the body and its larger context – nature, the environment, the cosmos.

Throughout her life, Hurtado maintained a commitment to environmental activism and directly transported this ecological awareness into her works. Illustrating life’s interdependence, the compositions of natural elements are accompanied by declarations that form explicit modes of protest.

At the heart of Pollinator Pathmaker is a growing network of Edition Gardens, custom-designed for the needs of local pollinating insects. A living artwork, Pollinator Pathmaker serves the natural world, rather than taking it as subject matter. The project asks humans to experience gardens from the viewpoint of at-risk pollinators, and to partake in their protection.

”I wanted to make art for pollinators, not about them. Pollinator Pathmaker is an ambitious art-led campaign to make living artworks for other species to enjoy. Can the audience for an artwork be more-than-human? Can art be useful in the ecological crisis?” – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

Pollinator Pathmaker responds to the dramatic decline in pollinating insects. This collapse has been precipitated by habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species and climate change.

The first International Edition of Pollinator Pathmaker is commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, launching in summer 2023.

Originally commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by Garfield Weston Foundation. Additional founding supporters Gaia Art Foundation and collaborators Google Arts & Culture.

In the next hundred years, the nature of water on Earth will undergo a fundamental change. Glaciers will melt, the level of the sea will rise, and its acidity will change more than it has in the past 50 million years. These changes will affect all life on earth, everyone that we know, and everyone that we love. It is more complex than the mind can comprehend, greater than all of our past experience, bigger than language.

Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary film director. His book ‘On Time and Water’ examines the relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis.

“On Time and Water - a book about the most urgent issues of our times, how all elements of water are changing in the next 100 years. I use the history of my family to connect in an intimate way to dates like 2100, something that seems like a very distant future is the time of the people we will love most in our lives. To understand the future we must connect to the past.” – Andri Snær Magnason