photograph by Wolgang Volz

Walking on Water with Christo

by LAURA RYSMAN

Christo has no time to waste. On his 81st birthday, days before the
opening of The Floating Piers, his monumental walkway across the
waters of Lake Iseo in Italy, I was trailing the artist along with several
of his assistants and a camera crew. We couldnt keep up. He strode
down a pier lined with dinghies for the projects teams of divers,
yelling, We built this! without turning back to face the scrambling
group behind him. He reached the piers edge and swung his wiry
frame around, launching into a description of the projects
engineering feats as we caught up with him.
Lake Iseo lies 60 miles northeast of Milan. The serene waters are
encompassed by steep slopes of forest and the occasional rocky-faced
mountain; small clusters of creamy yellow houses with terra cotta
roofs dot the sparsely populated shores. The idyllic scene is the site of
what may be Christos most magical installation, The Floating Piers
a 3.5-mile golden yellow path through the medieval streets of Sulzano
on the shoreside, from where pedestrians walk across the water to

Peschiera Maraglio on the peaked island of Monte Isola, and circle

the tiny, castle-dotted island of San Paolo. Covered in dahlia yellow
fabric as Christo describes it, the path is a sunshine color reminiscent
of the saffron robes of Buddhist monks; it brightens and darkens with
the changing light, and as the walkway undulates with the waves.
The numinous effect of the walkway stands in stark contrast with the
engineering and construction blitz that filled the lake with the sound
of helicopters and motorboats in the lead-up to opening day.
Building this matrix Christo pointed to the lattice of plastic
cubes on which he stood, is like building a highway. He indicated
the floating helicopter pad, the journalists dock, the boat wharf all
areas built just to support the construction of the final walkway
and counted off statistics of the total undertaking: 190 concrete
anchors, each weighing five tons, installed by a team of six French
divers, working at a depth of 300 feet. All of this cantilevered to a
floating pontoon walkway that stretches across nearly two miles of
water, piecing together 220,000 of the 20-inch cubes, and all of it to
be recycled after July 3. Work began in November with a team of 50
Bulgarian installers, then came the divers, then, this month, 600
additional workers.
Christo, born in Bulgaria, was a political refugee in Paris at age 21
when he met the love of his life and fellow mononym Jeanne-Claude.
(Surnames: Javacheff and Denat de Guillebon respectively.) They
worked side by side for fifty years, creating an art form all their own:
large-scale installations that exist at the intersection of architecture,
urban planning, and art, rending a sublime experience from familiar
landscapes and cityscapes. Christo closed his eyes as he recounted
their history: 22 projects rejected, 37 completed in 1972, the giant
Valley Curtain in Colorado; in 1985, the wrapping of Pariss Pont
Neuf, then Berlins Reichstag in 1995; in 2005, The Gates in Central
Park; in 2009, Jeanne-Claude passed away. He opened his eyes. Now
we are here, he said, the plastic pier creaking underfoot with the
waves, and I dont have a lot of time.
Christo had told his nephew and long-time operations manager,
Vladimir Yavachev, that he was going to turn 80 in 2015, and he

wanted to get something done quickly. Christo wanted to make

people walk on water. He chose the height of summer for the
installation longer sunshine and invoked the water, sky, and
mountains as elements in his composition. He pronounced, his
Bulgarian accent thickening, an emphatic prescription: Its not a
project to look at, its a project to walk. Real walk, not virtual. Not
virtual sun. Not virtual wet. The real walk.
Despite the incredible engineering complexities of The Floating Piers,
the project came together in less than two years a breeze compared
to the decades-long process of several prior projects. Christo first
conceived of the idea in 1970, but settled on Lake Iseo for the site in
2014, long after having tried in Argentina and later Japan. It will last,
like all of his installations, for just a brief moment sixteen days,
until July 3, free and open to the public 24 hours a day.
These precious sixteen days, thats because these projects of mine
cannot be bought, cannot be owned, cannot be possessed, Christo
said, yelling into the wind as a helicopter transported building
materials overhead. They are projects of total freedom. Nobody can
own these, because if you own something, its not free. This is why
they are made for everybody. They exist only in this very precious
time, and never again, like our life. Were gone, and then we will
never be again.
Christo stared into the distance for a moment, strands of his white
hair flapping in the wind, before speedboats of his young
crewmembers caught his eye. They were on their way to install a
rehearsal run of the fabric that would be sewn to the long walkway for
opening day. They whooped and yelled Happy birthday! to Christo
as the boats ferried them towards the San Paolo pier. He waved and
smiled, seeing it was time to get work. Stepping into a speedboat, he
took off towards his floating esplanade, yelling goodbye to us without
turning around.