Italian fisherman Paolo Fanciuli is an activist fisherman who fights for nature conservation and strives to preserve and protect the marine ecosystem from economic interests. That’s why he created an underwater museum in the Tuscany region in the port of Talamone called “Fish House” (“La Casa Dei Pesci”) and gathers artists and entrepreneurs who want to prevent illegal trawling, i.e. fishing with a net that ships drag along the bottom of the sea, collecting everything in their path.
Paolo placed various sculptures on the bottom in order to protect the flora and fauna from trawlers’ nets. It is his weapon in the fight against commercial fishing. He placed 44 huge statues in the sea at a depth of seven meters so that even divers can see them. These are sculptures of women, mermaids, huge shells, starfish, pillars as if from ancient Greece, human figures covered with algae.
This year, he placed four new sculptures at the bottom, and one of them was Maša’s.
My sculpture is called Nautilus. We were asked to make a deep relief, not a three-dimensional form, so my Nautilus resembles a shell. He is not a real Nautilus but more like the rest of that underwater world. That was the idea, let’s go back to the fossils, that the sea is not private but belongs to the whole planet. It is important to highlight the sea and its bottom because we need to deal with the preservation of underwater surfaces and the plants that grow there.
Maša Paunović
Text Source: https://www.rts.rs/magazin/Zanimljivosti/5274250/muzej-na-dnu-mora-kuca-ribe-toskana.html
Video source: https://www.rts.rs
