The Floating Piers

As I said in my previous post, now I'm going to write about The Floating Piers, which is a project of the artists Christo (Vladimir Yavachev) and Jeanne-Claude.

You can read this on the official website: "For sixteen days – June 18 through July 3, 2016 – Italy’s Lake Iseo was reimagined. 100,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular floating dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes, undulated with the movement of the waves as The Floating Piers rose just above the surface of the water".

Due to the fact that I didn't go to the Lake Iseo to see this artwork, I asked one of my friend, Beatrice, to tell me something about her experience.

Me: how did you get to know about The Floating Piers?

Beatrice: some friends of mine got to know about it from some of their friends who live in Sarnico (a town on the side of the Lake Iseo)

Me: Why did you decide to go to see it?

Beatrice: I decided to go to spend some time with my friends and to do something different, also considering that it was a temporary installation.

Me: Did you have any expectations?

Beatrice: I had a precise idea about the Floating Piers: I thought it would be more “rustic”, made by wood (or, at least, a kind of wood), like a Tibetan bridge. Also, I imagined it could have been more narrow, so that a smaller number of people could walk keeping a line. I also thought it could have had ropes on the extremities and another colour, not so bright as it was.

Me: when and how did you get there?

Beatrice: I went there early in the morning, to avoid the queue on the entrance and the hours of the day with the hottest weather.

Due to the fact that the shuttle bus service wasn't totally operative, we had to walk for 8 km from Iseo to Sulzano.

Me: what did you feel when you arrived at the Piers?

Beatrice: you could feel that you were floating but this sensation disappeared after some minutes.

Beatrice's photo

Me: Do you have some critics? What did you dislike?

Beatrice: The prices were very high, people were rude and they often threw garbage in the lake; the covering of the piers made you stumble and I think that the access should have been denied to dogs and little children because of the risks for their health (as faints and collapses) – there were ambulances and places where you could buy water in Montisola. The queue for the shuttle buses was very long, you could wait also for three hours. The pier wasn't anything special - it had the role of a boat -  but it was good for those who worked there.

Me: Instead, what did you like?

Beatrice: I liked the environment and especially Montisola, but it's a place I already knew because I went there a lot of times in the past.

Beatrice's photo

Me: did you suggest to anyone to see this artwork?

Beatrice: I didn't suggest to anybody to go there, but if someone told me that they would have liked to go, my advice was to visit the Piers early in the morning to avoid queues.

Here there's a map of the Lake Iseo

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See you soon

Yours, Silvia