Atlantropa X

Wood, seaweed, video projections, dimensions variable.
Visualizations of Ocean Current Flows Credit:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio,
Refugees Visual Documents Credit: Omega Television Channel, Cyprus
Video Production: Kyriakos Kousoulides
Sound: Demetris Savva

Atlantropa-X in the context of the Malta Pavilion conceptually and artistically joins the two islands of the Mediterranean, by offering glimpses on the utopian drives and the dystopian fallouts that characterize the Mediterranean area. Atlantropa was a gigantic engineering and colonization idea devised by German architect Herman Sorgel in the 1920s, proposing to drain the Mediterranean forming a European supercontinent. Today, more than ever, the Atlantropa scheme – of forming land bridges in the Mediterranean – seems relevant as it is suddenly fortified by contemporary intensity to remind us of the limits on freedom – migrants and refugees – and the destiny of the inhabitants of this area (surviving amid military, political, economic, social complexities/contrasts, migrations and fluid topographies of rejected, forgotten, unseen and silent memories).