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Jason Decaires Taylor/Getty ImagesA Sculpture Park— at the Bottom of the Ocean
You’re snorkeling around a coral reef when you see it—a human face. Wait … make that hundreds of human faces. You’ve just entered the world of Jason deCaires Taylor, an undersea artist who sculpts life-size human forms and then installs them on the ocean floor. In 2006, Taylor opened the world’s first underwater sculpture park, off the coast of Grenada; in 2009, he expanded to Cancún. Sculpting figures from pH-neutral concrete, Taylor aims not only to give tourists something to look at but also to give sea critters somewhere to live. Installations like the Silent Evolution, a string of 400 human figures, function as artificial coral reefs, simultaneously offering sea life a new home and drawing tourists away from the overexposed natural reefs in some of the world’s most-visited waters.
Kaupo Kikkas/Landov MediaAn Abandoned Theater— in the Sinai Desert
“Imagine you are watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in one of 700 wooden seats in a cinema with sand walls.” So reads the original press release for what became known as the End of the World Cinema, an ill-fated open-air movie theater tucked between sand dunes of the Sinai. In the late ’90s, French artist Diynn Eadel took a trip through Egypt and fell in love with “the great theater of nature.” He vowed to give the Sinai Desert a cinema, walled by mountains and lit by stars. Eadel secured investments and building permits, erected a screen, and relocated 700 hand-painted chairs from a Cairo theater to complete his vision. Everything was set for the opening—then the power died. Whether an act of anti-tourist sabotage or pure accident, that was it: No film has ever played there.
Courtesy Stein TronstadLenin’s Head— in Subzero Antarctica
The South Pole of Inaccessibility is the point on Antarctica farthest from the sea—the literal middle of nowhere. So why did Soviet scientists erect a bust of Vladimir Lenin there? Simply put: chutzpah. It was the 1950s, and everything was a flexing match between the United States and Russia. In 1956, America set up a research station at the South Pole. Russia retorted by slapping up a station at the Pole of Inaccessibility two years later. Today, most of the Soviet station is buried by snow, but you can still see its peculiar crown: Lenin’s frozen head, gazing perpetually across the tundra toward Moscow
