Gregor and Harold, two corals living in the underwater remains of Miami, share their dreams with each other. Made without any computer effects, using real coral specimens.
Lucas Leyva created this film for Borscht 9.
Premiere: Slamdance Film Festival, 2014
The Coral Reef are Dreaming Again
Essay by Marine Biologist Colin Foord
The Coral Reef Are Dreaming Again is a fusion of three different short films that Coral Morphologic has either contributed to, or collaborated on, from the past three Borscht Film Festivals. The script was written by Lucas Leyva, but the concept was inspired by many Miamians, and adapted to frame a famous allegory of 3rd century BCE Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. The result is a new film re-contextualized to mirror many of the metaphorical concepts that both Coral Morphologic and Borscht Corp. broach in our respective works. In fact, the existence of the film itself is representative of the accretion, hybridation, and symbiosis that amplifies creative output from the Magic City.
If The Coral Reef are Dreaming Again seems confusing at first view, that’s okay, as it is flooded with metaphors (including flooding metaphors). In it we have two anemones that question the reality of their dreams. In this sense, the classic story of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, is flipped. In the original story, Zhuangzi is left questioning whether he exists as a man only because the butterfly dreams it so, leaving him in something of an existential paradox. However, in this film the story takes the perspective of the beautiful creatures questioning their own existence as they look backwards through the mirror of a perceived reality that may or may not be a dream. The film portrays two cyclical lifeforms face-to-face at their metaphysical nexus. If I had to sketch this relationship, I would draw an ouroboros (like Borscht’s logo) and twist it to form a figure eight-like Moebius strip. Ultimately the film lays bare the interconnected and infinite nature of the universe, while postulating that multiple universes may in fact be interactive.
On a more tangible metaphorical level, the context of the film only makes sense from the perspective of the time and space from which it was birthed. First, it must be understood that Miami is a city whose infrastructure is literally comprised of the processed skeletal remains of corals and marine life that once colonized South Florida when it was submerged in eras past. Almost every building, sidewalk, and highway in Miami contains calcium carbonate-based concrete that is recycled from the remnants of those coral reefs. It is a city where vertebrate and invertebrate life-forms are forever bonded through a calcium carbonate matrix. Skeletons that were once enveloped with fluorescent coral tissue now form the foundation for a neon metropolis to mirror its coral reefs.
In death there is opportunity, and corals take full advantage. In fact, coral reefs only form when corals grow on top of the skeletons of their ancestors. Over many years, the upward growth of new corals results in a dynamic three-dimensional urban ecosystem. From the Coral Morphologic perspective, corals are the primeval city-builders on planet Earth. Besides humans, they are the only other animals that build structures visible from space, and they have been doing so millions of years before before animal-kind crawled its way out of the primordial oceans to colonize terra firma. With corals long predating the dawn of humanity (and the supposed conscious awareness of reality that came with it), the film suggests that perhaps it is we that are living inside of a coral’s dream of the future.
In the film we see a man within the coral dream who lives in the Magic City; a place where gender roles and identities are fluid and ever-shifting. This is no different from the coral reef, where many species are frequently transsexual or hermaphroditic. Gender politics and sex have long played a central role in the cultural identity of Miami, a place where flamboyance and sex are celebrated as a form of liberated consciousness that allows people the freedom to be as nasty as they want to be. On the coral reef, sexual reproduction is celebrated in an annual cosmic ritual that that is synchronized to the celestial clockwork of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Organisms of all kinds celebrate in a nocturnal orgy that mixes the sperm and eggs of a myriad of species together. The sea becomes a genetic soup in which none of the resulting offspring will ever know the identity of their parents. Likewise, Miami is a melting pot of genetics whose affinity for the ultraviolet rays of Sun is only surpassed our nocturnal attractions beneath the libidinous tug of the Moon.
Just as Miami has been flooded and dried many times throughout glacial and greenhouse periods of Earth’s history, it will one day be submerged once more. Miami has an Atlantean destiny, one that is actualizing before our eyes as humans expire gases that are insulating the planet like a blanket. Already corals and humans alike are being forced to adapt to new climate conditions whether we like it or not. The durability of Miami Beach will no doubt be tested within our lifetime. It is, afterall, a city, not yet a century old, that was dredged from the mud by opportunistic real estate tycoons looking to sell island dreams to frigid Americans. While many coastal cities and islands around the world will be faced with rising sea levels, few other places have the treble handicap of being artificially constructed, in the crosshairs of increasingly powerful hurricanes, and just a few miles from one of the strongest oceanic currents on the planet.
When the ocean finally comes licking at our doorsteps, the South Floridian real estate pyramid will crystallize as a monument to New World fantasies. Eventually the limestone remnants of our metropolis will be recolonized by the corals as their own, and our collective destinies will come full circle. The corals of Miami represent the ouroboros of construction, consumption, decay, and resurrection. In the meantime, we humans may be trapped in the samsara of existence, unaware of the true nature of reality, and breaking the cycle may be as easy as waking up inside a coral’s dream.
-Colin Foord, Marine Biologist
writer/director: Lucas Leyva
corals/music: Coral Morphalogic
producer: Jillian Mayer
executive producer: Jonathan Kane
director of photography: Daniel Fernandez
performer: Geraldine
Coral Morphologic is the brainchild of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician Jared McKay. Best friends since middle school in New Hampshire, the duo began Coral Morphologic in Miami in 2007 as an experimental endeavor to hybridize art and science, with living corals as their primary inspiration.
Colin moved to Miami in 2000 to study marine biology at the University of Miami. Upon graduation, Colin became increasingly involved within the burgeoning local music scene which was overlapping with the art community that was just beginning to crystallize in the Wynwood neighborhood. Here was a place where a relatively small cadre of brilliant weirdoes was actively increasing the value of an entire city through the collective efforts of their individual creativity - just like corals on a reef.
There was mutual recognition that the best way to get ahead professionally as artists was to work together symbiotically, because at that time few outsiders were taking Miami seriously. The prototypical idea for Coral Morphologic was born when Colin realized that the corals he was studying as a scientist were every bit as artistic as anything in a gallery, and that they belonged in Miami’s renaissance.
At that point Colin suggested to Jared that he move to Miami so they could develop these ideas together as a duo. Miami proved to not only be an ideal place for such an idea to take root, but it was also the only city where the metaphorical similarities of corals and Miami’s urban environments were also biologically and chemically synonymous.
The early years of Coral Morphologic were largely defined by the financial necessities of establishing a vertically-integrated coral aquaculture business. Before even having a website, we were launching our online venture on eBay from just a spare room of our home.
While it was frustrating not being able to actualize many of our early artistic ideas due to financial and practical constraints, we instead focused our output on photography and temporary aquarium installations. As soon as the Canon 5D Mark II came onto the market, our friends at Borscht Corp encouraged us to buy one and we immediately became filmmakers.
Now we had all the tools we needed to film the macro-universe of our corals, and then project them upon the city’s walls as a testament to Miami’s past, present, and future bio-geologic history.
In 2010, after recognizing the constraints of being taken seriously with only a home-based Lab (and with the semi-confidence that we could afford to expand our business), Coral Morphologic moved into a 3,000 sq ft warehouse on the Miami River.
An unknown guest visiting our brand new Lab on a ‘Weird Miami Bus Tour’ turned out to be the president of the Knight Foundation who offered on-the-spot to support our dream of doing a series of large-scale building projections (Artificial Reef) of coral during the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach. After Artificial Reef’s successful completion, we applied for, and were awarded a Knight Arts Challenge grant for Aquacultural Transformation of Miami, a project in which we’ve continued to blanket the city with coral art and projections in order to establish them as new icons for the city.
In recent years Coral Morphologic has collaborated symbiotically with a wide swath of creatives including Borscht Corp., Animal Collective, MIA Skate Shop, fine artists, and musicians as we continue our mission to bring the majesty of corals into pop-cultural consciousness and rebrand the city of Miami.
website: coralmorphologic.com