Porsche: Artistic journey under water 🎥
ORIGINAL Two Polish conceptual artists transformed a Porsche into an apparition from another world. At the Gdynia Design Days art festival, Ada Zielinska and Rafal Dominik presented a unique installation.
One morning last summer in the Polish port city of Gdynia, there was a crowd on the quay. Suspended at a great height, the unmistakable outline of an early Porsche 911 could be seen, its faded red body almost completely covered in coral and seaweed.
Dreaming imagination and a 911
However, it was not about the recovery of a lost car there, but rather an installation by conceptual artists on the occasion of the annual Gdynia Design Days art festival. Playfully working with the themes of the 2022 festival - the ocean and climate change - the artists created a fantastical vision of an artificial reef by interweaving an air-cooled 911 and a dreamy narrative to imagine what this car would look like if left to the Baltic Sea for generations.
Challenge to find a car
The first challenge was also the biggest: finding a car for such an artistic journey. Marek Sworowski, head of marketing at Porsche Poland, set out to find a Porsche owner who would agree to watch the car temporarily transform into an artificial reef. Marek Sworowski: "We narrowed the search down to contacts whose cars were in need of restoration. So when we found a 1973 911T, that seemed like the right choice. No matter what layer - anyone would recognize the well-known 911 shape."
Artificial coral structures in 3D printing
For Zielinska and Dominik, the artistic process consisted of creating artificial coral structures from crushed shells and 3-D printing, and bonding them to the surface of the car in an intensive two-week effort.
Ada Zielinska: "When the finished work - lifted by a crane over the harbor - was first seen, many onlookers were quite shocked. They really thought the car had been salvaged from the sea."