Surrounded Island

This work from 1981 by Christo & Jeanne-Claude, entitled Surrounded Islands. Project for Biscayne Bay, is an emblematic testimony to their way of conceiving art as vision, process and intervention in the real landscape. The work is articulated in two complementary parts, which make visible the passage from the idea to its possible realization.

In the upper section, conceived as a map, the drawing is essential and analytical. The islands of Biscayne Bay are outlined with clear, almost cartographic lines, and connected by a fluid line that suggests the artist’s projectual gesture.

Here the work takes on a conceptual character: it does not yet represent the visual experience, but establishes its structure, scale and spatial relationship with the territory of Miami, while the map functions as a mental device, a kind of score that anticipates the environmental intervention.

The lower part, larger and more visually engaging, instead presents the project in its perceptual dimension; through a mixed technique – drawing, fabric, color and annotations – Christo renders an aerial view of the islands surrounded by large expanses of pink floating fabric, which spread over the water creating a strong chromatic contrast with the deep blue of the bay; the islands, at the center of these artificial “auras,” appear at once protected and highlighted, as if the natural landscape were temporarily framed by a monumental artistic gesture.

The work is not only a representation, but also a project document: the writings, measurements and technical indications emphasize the logistical and engineering complexity of the intervention, a fundamental element in the work of Christo & Jeanne-Claude. The drawing thus becomes a meeting place between poetic imagination and technical precision.

Starting in April 1981, the attorneys Joseph Z. Fleming and Joseph W. Landers, the marine biologist Anitra Thorhaug, the ornithologists Oscar Owre and Meri Cummings, the mammal expert Daniel Odell, the marine engineer John Michel, four consulting engineers and the builder-contractor Ted Dougherty of A and H Builders, Inc. worked on the preparation of Surrounded Islands, the marine and land crews cleaned the eleven islands, collecting debris in bags and removing it after eliminating approximately forty tons of assorted garbage: refrigerator doors, tires, kitchen sinks, mattresses and an abandoned boat.

Surrounded Islands perfectly embodies their poetics: a temporary, non-permanent art that radically transforms the perception of a place without appropriating it, inviting the viewer to look at the landscape with new eyes.

This work from 1981 is not only the project for a future installation, but an autonomous work that contains within itself the utopia, the scale and the ambition of one of the most celebrated interventions of twentieth-century Land Art.