“Upside Down” is an installation in Shenzhen made of discarded fishing nets forming a landscape suspended between sea and sky people can walk through.
“Upside Down” has been designed for WWF to raise awareness on the work of recycling fishing nets done with local fishing communities. Throwing away used nets costs nowadays much less than repairing them, but this commonly used practice has enormous repercussions on the ecosystem of the seabed globally: WWF's effort is to involve local fishing communities to find and define alternative solutions.
The installation is part of a larger event open to the public for three weeks in the new Sea World Culture and Art Center facing Shenzhen bay, which will further travel around other Chinese cities.
Visitors can experience different installations organized on few stations: Fishing Behind the Net "Fishermen's Story Exhibition, "Fresh Responsibility" Fish Market, “inside and outside the net” audio and visual stations, Marine Biodiversity Map of China, photographic material to document WWF activities in the ocean and workshops as a contribution to becoming aware of consuming the fish species whose fishing has less impact on the fragile balance of marine life. All installations have a different interactive character to appeal to different senses: visitors could get to know the ocean in depths by walking into the installation and feel the texture of the fishing net, reading the fisherman stories, listening to the music or learning to select the sustainable seafood.
To build an emotional bond between people living in the city and the oceans, fishing nets have been used as a metaphoric connecting element. It is in fact a tool for fishermen working in the sea, a soft element with an adaptive shape, a barrier that blends in with the color of the sea…“Upside Down” installation creates an evocative environment visitors can interact with, being free to move around. The installation is organized as single units that can be assembled as a dense vertical group or along a walkway to create a stretched path.
Taking inspiration from the shape of the fishing pot nets, the layout has developed like a group of modular elements rising up from the ground. The result is a series of subtly organic objects, structures that arise from below and grow upwards. Their repetition creates an immersive effect, an enveloping background inviting visitors to immerse themselves into a different environment full of marine references, as if we were bringing the Ocean into the city. The installation is a hymn to the sea and the man. Material used for the wrapping are used fishing nets, recovered from sea waste, which show the marks of life and time. They have been cut, adapted, sewed again and installed together, in the same way fishermen used to do every day, to mend and fix what the ocean is constantly consuming in a relationship of love and struggle.
