A unique marine installation in the world will be inaugurated in Australia in August. It's about the MOUA, Museum of Underwater Art, a museum at the center of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world which risks disappearing.
The MOUA will be the only underwater art museum in the Southern Hemisphere and consists of multiple installations created by renowned British underwater sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor.
The museum aims to promote the conservation of the coral reef, but also to teach the divers who explore it and all those who visit it every year respect for this extremely precarious ecosystem. Over time, the sculptures themselves become coral reefs to which marine flora and fauna cling to survive and reproduce.
The Great Barrier Reef is located within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, off the coast of Townsville, a town in North Queensland, Australia. It is made up of more than 2900 individual coral reefs and 900 islands. It extends for 2300 kilometers over an area of approximately 344.400 square km. In the last hundred years, however, the barrier has also been used as a landfill, so that the constant decline of one of the symbols not only of Australia but of the world has pushed activists to fight to put an end to this massacre. Taylor will contribute, with his work, to the repopulation of the reef.
Jason fromCaires Taylor he is not an artist like the others. In addition to creating works of art, he was the first to worry about sending a message for the protection of coral reefs. Over the past decade Taylor has created several underwater “museums” and “sculpture parks,” with collections of more than 850 life-size public works.
Among the most famous is MUSA, Museo Subacuático de Arte, built in the depths of the Costa Maya in Mexico; the Atlantic Museum, in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, where he also wanted to launch a social message with the work "Raft of Lampedusa", one of the most significant sculptures in this submerged museum; Ocean Atlas in the Bahamas where lying on the seabed you can admire the largest submerged sculpture in the world; The Sculpture Coralarium, off the island of Sirru Fen Fushi, in the Shaviyani atoll, Maldives.