works of art to fight against illegal fishing

In the bay of Talamonde (Italy) hides an underwater museum, with about twenty mysterious sculptures. Difficult to define the style. Because here, the objective is not the visit: the statues are there to discourage illegal fishing, by breaking the nets of the trawlers. If industrial fishing is theoretically prohibited in this protected coastal area, until recently, trawlers still came there.

Paolo Fanciulli, fisherman and inventor of “la Casa dei Pesci”, had had enough. “Industrial fishing uses a trawl that scrapes the seabed. It destroys plants, fish eggs, their habitats, ravages spaces. Mine is a net that does not move”, he confides. A friend, owner of a marble quarry, offered him blocks of between 10 and 15 tons each. Volunteer artists imagined works, which were submerged between five and eight meters deep. When the trawlers scrape the bottom now, their nets tear. Paolo hopes to expand the protected area to the mouth of a natural park further north.