Earlier this month during Miami Art Week, conceptual artist Leandro Erlich unveiled Concrete Coral: 22 life-size cars cast in marine-grade concrete and anchored to the seafloor. The installation inaugurates the ReefLine, a seven-mile underwater sculpture park that pairs site-specific art with coral restoration.
Each vehicle is made from pH-neutral concrete engineered to encourage coral attachment. That material choice is central to ReefLine’s mandate: ecological recovery, not spectacle. The nonprofit was founded by Argentinian curator Ximena Caminos in partnership with OMA / Shohei Shigematsu, with a focus on rebuilding Florida’s reef systems under accelerating climate stress.
Concrete Coral functions as habitat as much as artwork. The cars are secured to withstand hurricane-strength wave action. Their hoods integrate Coral Lok, a system developed by ReefLine’s Miami Native Coral Lab to fix coral fragments quickly while minimizing stress. As the fragments take hold, the structures are expected to grow dense stands of octocorals, gradually dissolving the cars’ outlines into living reef.
The choice of subject is deliberate. On land, cars are among the largest contributors to air pollution. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO₂ annually, and the American Lung Association reports that over 156 million people in the United States are exposed to unhealthy air. Submerged, those same forms flip meaning—from engines of extraction to scaffolds for regeneration.
“The choice of cars is metaphorical: once carriers of pollution and speed, they now become vessels of regeneration,” Erlich says. “What once drove us away from nature becomes a stage for its return.”
ReefLine’s director of science, Colin Foord, underscores the visual effect: the installation will read like a forest overtaking a gridlock, nature reclaiming a human artifact in real time.
Concrete Coral is only the first chapter. Future installations include The Miami Reef Star by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre—46 3D-printed stars inspired by starfish migration—and Heart of Okeanos by Petroc Sesti, a sculpture modeled after a blue whale’s heart. Both are scheduled for installation in 2026.
The ambition is clear. ReefLine treats art as infrastructure: objects designed to age, erode, and grow useful over time. In that context, Erlich’s submerged cars aren’t a gimmick. They’re a prompt—pointing from a carbon-heavy past toward a slower, restorative future.
