Paradise Resort

Paradise resort is a project focused on the suffering and destruction of many marine ecosystems by human beings. This artwork was created during the Marine Litter Art art residency, that the artist carried out in Sicily in the summer of 2021. During the stay the invited artists created site specific installations using exclusively the waste collected during the cleaning of the area at the mouth of the river Platani, in the province of Agrigento. Shocked by the amount of plastic that was present at the mouth, she chose to work with these materials: polystyrene, packaging, bottles, flasks and plastic caps, sometimes complemented by natural elements such as wood and cuttlefish bones. The installation would like to be a dystopian representation of a future – perhaps not too distant – in which humanity will have caused the disappearance of biodiversity as we know it today and will have adapted to live in a world made of plastic, the same plastic that we created and of which we no longer know how to get rid of. She imagined a hypothetical luxury hotel of the future that will present itself to its potential guests as a paradise from which they can enjoy a privileged and exclusive view of what they think to be the beauties of the sea: over a complicated system of super pools, the first installation’s element, looms a grotesque structure that wants to be the simulacrum of a coral reef. This second element was inspired by the underwater concretions that she had the opportunity to observe during some dives in the Mediterranean: gorgonians, anemones, sponges, etc. which she tried to evoke in an altered key, imagining a possible deadly metamorphosis. Tourists in the pool will not realize what is above them, because they will have lost the memory of what had been before and also the ability to distinguish between what is authentic and natural, and what is not at all.