Jacques Cousteau’s lifelong dream of living beneath the sea set artists Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi to thinking about artworks as relics of the future.
[this text was first commissioned to Isola and Norzi and published by ABITARE, (issue 501, April 2010) as an editorial project titled LIVING UNDERWATER, edited by Paola Nicolin]
A little over a year ago, Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi began working on a project inspired by Jacques Cousteau and his surprisingly nonchalant undersea-colony experiments off the Sudanese coast in the early 1960s. Cousteau’s utopia became a reality in 1963, when six oceanauts spent a month in the Starfish House on the sea floor off Port Sudan. The house worked like a steel lung, a spherical dome whose habitable space was separated from the sea by just a liquid door created solely by the air pressure inside the house. The door was both a screen and a threshold between outside (the sea) and inside (the house), which radically altered not the whole idea of the domestic threshold, but also the hermeneutics of habitable space, anticipating the later insights of Radical architecture. Cousteau was concerned not only with the physical construction of space, but also with its representation. Life without sun was the subject of a documentary (winner of an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1965) called “Le Monde Sans Soleil”, in which he recorded the life the oceanauts led inside the dome, playing on the ambivalence of glass as a screen that both separates and unites the daily routines inside the dome and the life – which is itself daily, too – of the undersea world outside. 45 years on, Cousteau’s idea lives on in the seaweed and coral that have colonized the house’s interior and exterior, suggesting new interpretations of utopian living, biodiversity, the poetics of objects retrieved from the sea, and storytelling as camera created fiction and mis-en-scène.
March 1943 - Bandol, Cotte d’Azur In Italian Fascist-occupied France, 33-year-old Jacques Cousteau receives, by express mail from Paris, a wooden crate sent to him with the utmost secrecy by French engineer Emile Gagnan. It contains the result of years of work by the two men, the prototype of an Aqua-Lung. It looks like a bomb, though all it contains is 150 atmospheres of compressed air. That same afternoon, with help from just his wife Simone and his friend Frèdèric Dumas, Cousteau dons the apparatus and slowly submerges. It is the first breath underwater in history. Cousteau’s notes that evening include this phrase: “…Each yard of depth we claimed in the sea would open to mankind 300,000 cubic kilometres of living space.”
March 1963 - Cologne, Germany At the 8th Photonica International Photography Exhibition, the Nikon stand has everyone’s undivided attention. The Nikonos, the first commercially-available underwater camera, is submerged in a large aquarium of goldfish. This is the only time the renowned Japanese company has decided to buy, disguise (restyle), and manufacture a design which was created and developed outside of Japan: Jean de Wouters’ and Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso, designed and made by the French firm La Spirotechnique.
July 1963 - Sha’ab Rumi, Red Sea, off Port Sudan The most important undersea living experiment comes to a successful conclusion. Six oceanauts from Cousteau’s team live for a month on the sea floor without ever surfacing. A documentary film and an extensive photographic record are produced. The experiment is partly financed by the Principality of Monaco in order to gather, describe, and collect tropical flora and fauna for its famous Oceanographic Institute aquarium. The mission’s principal aim is to demonstrate that a variety of routine domestic activities can be performed in the Starfish House, the world’s first underwater dwelling. Cousteau notes in his diary, “… cigarettes smoked underwater burn twice as quickly because of the greater air pressure.”
April 1965 - Santa Monica, California Le Monde sans Soleil wins an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Cousteau’s film also wins worldwide acclaim. However, in a New York Times review, Bosley Crowther controversially questions the authenticity of two of the film’s most dramatic sequences. Cousteau takes great offense. In later years the film is withdrawn and is now almost impossible to find.
August 1995 - Genoa, Italy Altinia, a cargo ship of the Grimaldi line, sets sail for Alexandria, Egypt, carrying containers and scrapped automobiles. The only passengers listed in the ship’s log are Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi. The event marked the start of our artistic partnership. It is the first of many voyages of discovery to East Africa inspired by the adventures of Hugo Pratt and Henry de Monfreid, and our close friendship with the founders of La Compagnia del Mar Rosso. Of the voyage’s countless thrilling, intriguing, and mysterious episodes, the ones that most inspire us are our dives down to what remains of a strange closed structure off the Sudanese coast, which was flooded and overgrown with seaweed, coral, and anemones.
February 2008 - New York City New York is a city of coincidences. In the Naturalia et Mirabilia store in the East Village we find a collection of Super 8 documentaries, which includes Le Monde Sans Soleil. Watching the film is an overwhelming experience. Suddenly we understand what our photos from Sudan of pieces of iron tempered by forty years on the sea floor actually portray. Thus begins our historical and artistic exploration of that unique underwater dwelling, and the positivist poetic mindset that inspired its creation. We decide for an ephemeral act against restoration theory, against the idea of putting a rock in a museum.
May 2009 - Coney Island, NY Instead of visiting Chelsea art galleries as planned, we go to Coney Island. Henceforth our imagination takes root not in the white boxes of contemporary art, but through another crazy form of idealized space - the aquarium as diorama, as flooded museum for underwater art. To quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Coney Island of the Mind.
Jacques Cousteau’s lifelong dream of living beneath the sea set artists Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi to thinking about artworks as relics of the future.
[this text was first commissioned to Isola and Norzi and published by ABITARE, (issue 501, April 2010) as an editorial project titled LIVING UNDERWATER, edited by Paola Nicolin]
A little over a year ago, Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi began working on a project inspired by Jacques Cousteau and his surprisingly nonchalant undersea-colony experiments off the Sudanese coast in the early 1960s. Cousteau’s utopia became a reality in 1963, when six oceanauts spent a month in the Starfish House on the sea floor off Port Sudan. The house worked like a steel lung, a spherical dome whose habitable space was separated from the sea by just a liquid door created solely by the air pressure inside the house. The door was both a screen and a threshold between outside (the sea) and inside (the house), which radically altered not the whole idea of the domestic threshold, but also the hermeneutics of habitable space, anticipating the later insights of Radical architecture. Cousteau was concerned not only with the physical construction of space, but also with its representation. Life without sun was the subject of a documentary (winner of an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1965) called “Le Monde Sans Soleil”, in which he recorded the life the oceanauts led inside the dome, playing on the ambivalence of glass as a screen that both separates and unites the daily routines inside the dome and the life – which is itself daily, too – of the undersea world outside. 45 years on, Cousteau’s idea lives on in the seaweed and coral that have colonized the house’s interior and exterior, suggesting new interpretations of utopian living, biodiversity, the poetics of objects retrieved from the sea, and storytelling as camera created fiction and mis-en-scène.
March 1943 - Bandol, Cotte d’Azur In Italian Fascist-occupied France, 33-year-old Jacques Cousteau receives, by express mail from Paris, a wooden crate sent to him with the utmost secrecy by French engineer Emile Gagnan. It contains the result of years of work by the two men, the prototype of an Aqua-Lung. It looks like a bomb, though all it contains is 150 atmospheres of compressed air. That same afternoon, with help from just his wife Simone and his friend Frèdèric Dumas, Cousteau dons the apparatus and slowly submerges. It is the first breath underwater in history. Cousteau’s notes that evening include this phrase: “…Each yard of depth we claimed in the sea would open to mankind 300,000 cubic kilometres of living space.”
March 1963 - Cologne, Germany At the 8th Photonica International Photography Exhibition, the Nikon stand has everyone’s undivided attention. The Nikonos, the first commercially-available underwater camera, is submerged in a large aquarium of goldfish. This is the only time the renowned Japanese company has decided to buy, disguise (restyle), and manufacture a design which was created and developed outside of Japan: Jean de Wouters’ and Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso, designed and made by the French firm La Spirotechnique.
July 1963 - Sha’ab Rumi, Red Sea, off Port Sudan The most important undersea living experiment comes to a successful conclusion. Six oceanauts from Cousteau’s team live for a month on the sea floor without ever surfacing. A documentary film and an extensive photographic record are produced. The experiment is partly financed by the Principality of Monaco in order to gather, describe, and collect tropical flora and fauna for its famous Oceanographic Institute aquarium. The mission’s principal aim is to demonstrate that a variety of routine domestic activities can be performed in the Starfish House, the world’s first underwater dwelling. Cousteau notes in his diary, “… cigarettes smoked underwater burn twice as quickly because of the greater air pressure.”
April 1965 - Santa Monica, California Le Monde sans Soleil wins an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Cousteau’s film also wins worldwide acclaim. However, in a New York Times review, Bosley Crowther controversially questions the authenticity of two of the film’s most dramatic sequences. Cousteau takes great offense. In later years the film is withdrawn and is now almost impossible to find.
August 1995 - Genoa, Italy Altinia, a cargo ship of the Grimaldi line, sets sail for Alexandria, Egypt, carrying containers and scrapped automobiles. The only passengers listed in the ship’s log are Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi. The event marked the start of our artistic partnership. It is the first of many voyages of discovery to East Africa inspired by the adventures of Hugo Pratt and Henry de Monfreid, and our close friendship with the founders of La Compagnia del Mar Rosso. Of the voyage’s countless thrilling, intriguing, and mysterious episodes, the ones that most inspire us are our dives down to what remains of a strange closed structure off the Sudanese coast, which was flooded and overgrown with seaweed, coral, and anemones.
February 2008 - New York City New York is a city of coincidences. In the Naturalia et Mirabilia store in the East Village we find a collection of Super 8 documentaries, which includes Le Monde Sans Soleil. Watching the film is an overwhelming experience. Suddenly we understand what our photos from Sudan of pieces of iron tempered by forty years on the sea floor actually portray. Thus begins our historical and artistic exploration of that unique underwater dwelling, and the positivist poetic mindset that inspired its creation. We decide for an ephemeral act against restoration theory, against the idea of putting a rock in a museum.
May 2009 - Coney Island, NY Instead of visiting Chelsea art galleries as planned, we go to Coney Island. Henceforth our imagination takes root not in the white boxes of contemporary art, but through another crazy form of idealized space - the aquarium as diorama, as flooded museum for underwater art. To quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Coney Island of the Mind.