As the sun rose over the Polish port city of Gdynia one morning last summer, a large crowd gathered on the dockside to gaze up at a strange yet familiar form. Suspended high overhead was the unmistakable outline of an early 911, its faded red bodywork almost completely covered with a dense tangle of coral and seaweed.

What the bemused onlookers were witnessing was not, despite initial appearances, the overdue recovery of a long-lost Porsche. Instead, it was a unique art installation created for the annual art festival ‘Gdynia Design Days’ by conceptual artists Ada Zielinska and Rafal Dominik. Playing with the 2022 festival’s themes around the ocean and climate change, the artists created a fantastical vision of an artificial reef, using a real air-cooled 911 and a dream-like narrative imagining how this precious car might have been abandoned to the Baltic for several generations.

“The story started when Porsche invited us to prepare an installation for Design Days,” recalls Zielinska. “Rafal and I wanted to do something that connected Porsche to the sea and took some inspiration from…