‘Ground zero for climate change’: the shoreline sculpture park coming to Miami

An ambitious multi-part project will transform seven miles of seabed into an artistic destination with a cautionary message

Over the next few years, coastal waters just off of Miami Beach will be transformed by The ReefLine, an ambitious new project that aims to occupy seven miles of seabed within shouting distance of the sands. The ReefLine aims to one day create an enormous, art-studded underwater playland, including a sculpture park, snorkel trail and hybrid reef.

One of the first pieces of this project, Miami Reef Star – a gigantic 90ft star that will eventually be visible to landing aircraft descending over the waters – will be on exhibition during Art Basel Miami Beach. Set up in prototype on Miami Beach itself, it will be a part of Star Compass, a series of three large-scale installations curated by Ximena Caminos and Dodie Kazanjian. In addition to Reef Star, Star Compass will also include The Great Elephant Migration, a work consisting of 100 life-sized sculptures of elephants, and Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, which will stage an enormous sailboat race.

Miami Reef Star will be composed of dozens of smaller stars, each itself serving multiple functions as hybrid coral reef, a home for fish and microorganisms, and an eye-catching site-specific sculpture. “There’s a massive amount of engineering that went into this,” said artist Carlos Betancourt, the creator of Miami Reef Star. “We’re working with marine biologists, scientists from the University of Miami … we’ve learned intensely about this.”

Reef Star plays on the form of starfish, with individual stars offering whimsical shapes that feel soft, playful and organic. When placed together they form a large star shape, which Caminos, founder and artistic director of The ReefLine, sees as an essential metaphor. “Before all this technology transformed our lives, humans used to sail the seas looking at stars and being guided by stars,” Caminos said. “To me the stars are like a metaphor that we need a new north.”

The modules in Miami Reef Star were created via 3D printing, utilizing two technologies that are meant to make it environmentally advantageous: CarbonXinc and Coral Lok. Created specifically for use in The ReefLine, CarbonXinc is a combination of eco-friendly concrete and materials that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere, capturing it in Reef Star as a carbon sink. Coral Lok is a device that makes it easier to regenerate coral reefs, in which individual loks are screwed into receiver materials, offering a foothold for new coral growth.

According to Caminos, the Great Florida Reef is the third-largest in the world. The only living coral barrier reef in the continental US, since the 1980s it has been in sharp decline. Threats to the reef include the spread of disease, bleaching due to elevated water temperatures, and sea-level rise, which can change the composition of ocean water in ways dangerous to coral and other organisms that thrive in the reefs.

Betancourt shared that in creating Reef Star, he in part drew inspiration from the artist Christo’s giant sculpture Surrounded Islands, in which the Bulgarian artist and his collaborator Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon encircled 11 islands Miami’s Biscayne Bay with floating pink fabric. “Before that, I didn’t know you could do art by surrounding islands, by putting pink plastic around them,” said Betancourt. “It’s hard not to expand your horizons when you see something like that. That project helped identify Miami as an adventurous place for art, and to this day I still use Christo Pink, it permeates all through my work. I’ll never never never forget it.”

Betancourt and his collaborator, architect Alberto Latorre, are both originally from Puerto Rico, and the reefs and waters off the coast of Miami and around the Caribbean Islands have long been central parts of their creative imaginations. For them, getting to place art into the seabed just off of Miami Beach was deeply connected to their artistic and cultural communities. “We’ve seen the bleaching, we’ve seen what pollution does to the reefs,” said Latorre. “What better thing to do than to collaborate with an amazing team to use this synthesis of art and science as a vehicle to create these artificial reefs?”

Funded in part by a $5m bond approved by Miami voters in 2022, The ReefLine will be implemented over the course of several years, according to a series of planned phases. Phase I is slated to occur in spring 2025, when Concrete Coral, a sculpture by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, will be made by sinking 22 concrete cars to form an art work modeled on a traffic jam. Seeded with innumerable Coral Loks that will foster the development of coral reefs, the work will ironically help to reverse the impact of automobiles on the reefs and oceans.

Reef Star is scheduled to be part of phase II, which will by implemented over the next two years. Future phases include British artist Petroc Sesti’s Heart of Okeanos, which is modeled after the heart of a blue whale, and a series of modules designed by Japanese architect Shohei Shigematsu that will eventually come to form a “living breakwater”.

Caminos sees these developments as very much a part of Miami’s larger-scale aspirations to be a leader in reversing climate change. “Miami is ground zero for climate change,” she said. “I think the city saw in ReefLine the image that they wanted to forecast to the world. That they’re not just a city with a problem but also a city that can bring forward a solution. Miami is slowly becoming a climate tech hub.”

Ultimately, Caminos hopes that The ReefLine will become a landmark synonymous with Miami as much as the Empire State Building is associated with New York City or Big Ben is associated with London. She also hopes that it will be a leading site of advocacy for the oceans, and a way of bringing about environmental change. “Art has the power to tap into someone’s emotions, and I hope that The ReefLine will inspire,” said Caminos. “It has the power to inspire people to act – the oceans are our heritage, and they are dying in silence because they don’t have a voice. They need someone to stand up for them. The world is at a very complex moment, and messages of hope are needed.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian