Art Islands: Ecological Thought, Underwater Sculpture and the Nature of Development in the Canary Islands

Abstract

When modern artist and architect Cesar Manrique returned home to Lanzarote, the northernmost of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, after a twentyyear sojourn abroad to study modern art in 1964, he returned to an island in flux.Energised by a burgeoning environmentalism acquired in New York City and terrified by the alreadyapparent impacts of mass tourism on this once-barren volcanic island, Manrique quite literally saw an opportunity in the landscape.Manrique and the local tourism bureau undertook a decades long project to rebrand and, more importantly, redesign the island as simultaneously artistic and ecologically unique.Thirty years later, UNESCO designated Lanzarote a World Heritage Site in part for this socio-ecological synthesis, in some ways precluding overdevelopment and in other ways encouraging Lanzarote's branding as a uniquely desirable tourist destination.Today, Lanzarote has made substantial public investment in the Museo Atlántico, a massive underwater museum and artificial reef, to extend Manrique's original legacy and sink tourism development to the seafloor.Lanzarote was one of the first 'art islands,' discreet geologic sites made unique in a competitive globalising island tourism industry by embedding art into the local ecology itself.This paper explores how island socio-ecology shaped Lanzarote's development into an art island, and illustrates how ideas of art, ecology, and value can cross oceans, create connectivity, and alter environments.

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