Cultured Magazine

C: You know, I was not very easy with that color. We started to meet many Hispanic people there and that energy, that dynamic and also the color, that very humid air—I was making drawings, little sketches with a very shy pink because I was not at ease with that shocking pink. But because the air is so full of water, we saw that from far away it needed to be a much stronger color—if not, you wouldn't see it. From the very light pink, it became a deep, very strong pink, but to do that it was another huge work. We always try to buy the fabric in the United States for a US project, but that was the biggest amount of fabric we'd bought for any of our projects, 6.5 million square feet of woven fabric. We had to find a fabric that is lighter than the water and could float. The pink color came from iron, which is heavy, and it is very delicate when you try to make a floating material heavy. That project was an incredible engineering feat. FS: Was it two weeks because of the materials, specifically? C: No, all projects are two weeks. The most expensive part of the exhibition was the payroll—all the security, police, traffic control, etc. After two weeks Jeanne-Claude would say, "it's enough." FS: Two weeks is per fect. It leaves an impression in ever ybody's imagination forever. C: That will never happen again. I will never wrap another island. FS: But now we get to celebrate it with the exhibition. C: The exhibition expresses a lot of the invisible aspects of the project. We have these incredible archived materials and also real components— not just photography, but the real anchors, the real things. You can see how we engineered something marvelous. The fabric moved up and down with the tide and kept the exact propor tion of the configuration of the floating material. FS: Sometimes we talk about the work, or art critics and historians talk about the work in relationship to land art, and this idea of big projects outside in the landscape, to solitude and to the large expanse. You're the opposite. C: There are two ways I work: urban projects or rural projects. We need to have a human scale. In the countryside, we need to have a house, a telephone pole, a bridge, to see how high and how wide the project will be. Running Fence and Surrounded Islands are both rural projects. You see the houses, the bridges, the little settlements, farms, all kinds of things. We're borrowing that space to create a "gentle disturbance" for a few days. And while we're in the space, we inherit everything about that space. We didn't invent the ecology of Biscayne Bay, but we're in the real bay, not a photograph of the bay or the water or the island. We don't invent the politics of the Reichstag, because we have the real Reichstag. There are sketches, drawings, films and photos, but for 14 days, our work was the Reichstag. There are photos, but for 14 days it was the real Biscayne Bay, the real wind, sun, everything—very close to all these elements that are inadvertently in the image of what kind of project is done. The work is related to that physicality of the human living in the space. FS: So many different ways that the work is acting with us. C: They're existing and we're witnessing. The different relations and ways that people engage with it—each time we do a project we learn more. culturedmag.com 213 Born in Bulgaria, Christo arrived in Paris a refugee in 1958. For years, he maintained two separate art practices: one of portraiture to support himself, and the other, the radical environmental interventions he has now made all over the globe. Here he is pictured with The Mastaba, constructed of more than 7,000 oil barrels last summer on the Serpentine Lake in London's Hyde Park. PHOTO BY WOLFGANG VOLZ

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