The New York Times
Arts
PILZONE, Italy — It was a long-held dream, but finally, this week, the artist Christo walked on water.
On
Thursday, the artist tried out his latest project, “The Floating
Piers,” a walkway stretching three kilometers, or nearly two miles, to
connect two small islands in Lake Iseo, in Italy’s Lombardy region, to each other and to the mainland.
Christo
walked on the floating walkway of puckered yellow-orange nylon fabric,
crafted to change color according to the time of the day and the
weather. On Thursday, it was pockmarked with bright orange blotches left
by footsteps treading on the rain-drenched fabric.
A Walk on Water
The artist Christo inaugurated his
first outdoor installation in over a decade, also the first since the
death of his partner Jeanne-Claude in 2009.
By AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER and ROBIN LINDSAY on Publish Date June 16, 2016.
Photo by Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times.
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“It’s
actually very painterly, like an abstract painting, but it will change
all the time,” Christo, a Bulgarian-born American citizen, said of his
project.
“The
Floating Piers” is his first outdoor installation since 2005, when he
and Jeanne-Claude, his collaborator and wife, who passed away in 2009,
installed 7,500 golden-paneled gates in Central Park in New York City.
Like his other works, the 15-million-euro, or $16.8 million, project
will be funded through the sale of his original works of art.
“I
think this is a record in the history of Christo’s special projects
because he and the team realized it in 22 months; normally it takes
decades,” the director of the project, the curator Germano Celant, said
on Thursday. “So I will say that it’s an Italian and American miracle at
the same time.”
“Look!”
Christo said, pointing to a juncture where two pathways joined to form a
bright saffron-colored V, contrasting against the deep blue of the
lake. “You see! It falls in that way so you can see the movement,” he
said. “It’s actually breathing.”
Getting
the walkway to both gently undulate and remain securely affixed to the
uneven lake bottom was the feat that has occupied engineers,
construction companies, French deep-sea divers and even a team of
Bulgarian athletes drafted over the past two years. The walkway is
assembled from 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes that form its
16-meter-wide spine, covered this week with a waterproof and
stain-resistant fabric made by a German company for the project.
“Each project is like a slice of our lives,’’ Christo said, “and part of something that I will never forget.”
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From
Saturday through July 3, the project will be open and free to the
public 24 hours a day, with a legion of boat hands, lifeguards, stewards
and information officers standing guard to avert unintentional dips in
the lake.
“It’s
really a physical thing, you need to be there, walking it, on the
streets, here. And it’s demanding,” Christo said. The route, which laps
around the small island of San Paolo, also includes pedestrian areas in
the towns of Sulzano, on the mainland, and Peschiera Maraglio, on Monte
Isola, an islet rising out of the lake.
The
project, he said, “is all this” — The piers, the lake, the mountains,
“with the sun, the rain, the wind, it’s part of the physicality of the
project, you have to live it.”
Continue reading the main story
Christo,
whose full name is Christo Javacheff, and his wife first envisaged a
floating piers project 46 years ago, when they were approached by an
Argentine art historian who suggested the Río de la Plata basin in South
America as a site, but the plans fell through. In 1995, they considered
reviving it in Tokyo Bay, Japan, but that project, too, was never
realized.
But Christo was determined.
Apart
from the sporadic protests of labor unions and a national environmental
organization that was worried about the impact on the lake, the Italian
project went smoothly after local officials and administrators came on
board.
But
the concerns about the ability of a small lake community to deal with
the avalanche of visitors that the project is expected to draw — an
estimated 40,000 people a day, according to officials — appear to have
been muted for now by enthusiasm for the project. Lake Iseo is arguably
northern Italy’s least famous lake, overshadowed by neighboring Lake
Garda. But hotels and other lodging options here and in nearby towns are
practically fully booked for the duration of the run.
“Lake
Iseo won’t be the same after this event,” said Fiorello Turla, the
mayor of Monte Isola. “Monte Isola will change skin,” as its exposure to
the global spotlight puts it on the map, he said. “It’s a great
opportunity that we’ve been given, and that we want to seize and bring
forward.”
At
the close of its 16-day period, the walkway will be dismantled and its
parts recycled and resold. “The important part of this project is the
temporary part, the nomadic quality,” Christo said. “The work needs to
be gone, because I do not own the work, no one does. This is why it is
free.”
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