Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable | Presented by HENI Talks

[Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] and I suppose we're all looking for a whole true story that makes sense but I think what makes you believe in things is not what's there it's about what's not there [Music] [Music] you know it's unbelievable to start with but that makes you believe it foreign [Music] the expedition began in 2010 we assembled a group of Consultants ecological experts to advise on avoiding damage to the site and representative from the host country to safeguard their interests and oversee what happened to anything we found we had spent the summer of 2009 remotely mapping the site from the surface it was clear from our scans that there was something down there but there was no clear indication as to what it was I've been doing this job for nearly 30 years and I wasn't about to jump to any conclusions foreign [Music] yes very good right welcome everybody my name's Andrew and I'm the Project Director on this Expedition uh this gentleman here is piatric Clinic he's a maritime archaeologist of extraordinary dive experience he will be leading the team under the water alongside Bruce who's going to be in charge of the divers so we're going to start by ground truth in the main anomalies from the geophysics and as you can see we have we have many artifacts spread over a large area with the major groups here here and here no sign of a ship uh which might indicate the wreck is early and the hull totally disintegrated but do keep an eye out for any Hull structure that we might have missed don't forget to record your locations as you work and keep in communication with the surface team this phase of the Expedition is what we call a predistaribant survey and this is mostly to establish really um in detail what is and how much of it is down there foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] it began for me in 2008 I was in the middle of my doctoral thesis I say in the middle I hadn't really written anything in a couple of months and I was I was running out of funds and then I discovered the clip on the internet [Music] I assumed it was posted by a Backpacker or a holiday maker someone like that [Music] all you could see a beach I assumed East African and community of fisherman and the clip was entitled fisherman discover statue group of fishermen have pulled something up in the net it looked like a curled up fetal monkey you see something come out of the water that you can't quite explain that's an adventure if you want to know more [Music] I thought if these fishermen found one thing stands to reason that there is more down there so I wanted to find this beach and I wanted to talk to this vision [Music] I'm here as soon as I saw it because I've seen it too often on the video the fishermen said they had been back to look whether there was anything else out there they couldn't find anything so after a lot of negotiation they took us out to where they said they discovered it you think about the right spot yes first day we go to this island is this place I go in I dive I die for hours to end you find anything oh that was nothing again no it took us days because it was a blind search nothing here patience yes yeah okay we nearly gave up it was on the fifth day had my GoPro on went down half an hour search [Music] voila [Music] finally yes you sure yeah yes yes Peter sent me the footage it showed what looked like a classical sculpture that had laid on the seabed for a considerable amount of time we knew it was worth pursuing but it was going to be hard to get funding through the usual channels it was controversy in the modern art World by creating a diamond encrusted skull in a revolution Brash and Brazen artist Damien Hurst is putting more than 200 New pieces up for auction Lot number one three hundred thousands thank you purse open mouth sharp staggered all expectations now that's a pretty penny for a pretty pickle one of the people that we approached was an artist who had just been in the news I didn't know much about him to me he was the the shark guy that at the auction where I sold all my Works in you know this three-day big sale and it really was the point where all the work like became commodity and it was like you know it just seemed like you make something sell it make something sell it make something selling it seems it seemed unsustainable and unfulfilling facts some reason after that auction it seemed like something had ended and something new was beginning [Music] the new era in his exploration of Inner Space I love fantasy shipwreck stories when I was a kid you know I just love them owners that cover this Earth comes the story of husbands chills Terror excitement Beyond prepared all those old movies about Treasures found under the sea in these Waters is a treasure worth of Fortune in gold I'm null of the sea because it's an element there's alien to it it's like you know it's like another planet on our own planet well the ocean is the last of the Earth's great unexplored Frontiers to find a major sponsor so soon who had money and an interest that was amazing he was basically prepared to take a Gamble I think everything that I've ever done has been a Gamble but I definitely wasn't tempted to get a wetsuit on because I think the Sharks would eat me [Music] foreign support go ahead [Music] from the scans we knew there was a lot down there but what we discovered was much bigger and more baffling than we'd expected [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] what's amazing is how it's integrated into the reef and to actually see the corals and everything that's growing onto it and the fish that are attached to it but it's still a sculpture it's like nothing you've ever seen before foreign to actually find something that's not been seen for you know lifetimes it's almost like you know finding something in its natural habitat that's what's exciting about the whole project [Music] sort of claiming it but it hasn't claimed all of it yet so it's it's like there's the beauty of the nature and there's the beauty of the sculpture side by side it's in a sort of extraordinary Garden it's like a sort of strange Victorian Grotto of the underworld it takes lots of years for corals to develop and you start asking yourself for how long have these things been done here you've just got so many questions coming through your mind of how do they get there how were they made who was it that possibly made them and what size ship was transporting them why were they coming through this area it's it opens so many questions it's a huge piece he's just scattered over quite wide area buried at different angles in the sun it's no sense really of what happened because there's no sense of of accident is it is it a shipwreck is it is it several it's a mystery I just say it is a mystery foreign the first couple of weeks we have a fascinating range of artifacts developing a wide range of dates providences selection of different styles suggests this could be the contents of a merchant ship as yet we don't have anything to pin a specific date down today we will start working with the airlift it's basically a device that will vacuum the seabed takes away the lighter materials and the sand to silt you know for the first time in possibly centuries you know we're we're disturbing what's underneath the sand it could be much more down [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I just saw something linting in the sand as you work in the least expected moments you uncover assumption that is crucial guys look at this all right okay what is it it's Roman wow fantastic it's Nero ad54-68 Roman first century it's like you got yourself a date big moment big moment for us the picture starts to become much clearer now this is great exactly the kind of thing we'd have to find dates from the rule of the emperor Nero so we know for certain ship could not have gone down before 54 A.D and I'm trying to get the important bit up here where is it there it is it's perfect and you see him Nero so if we're talking about a shipwreck from between the mid first and mid-second centuries A.D during this period there was a Roman Market in plunder of earlier classical cities and a market for artifacts from Egypt and of course in the first century navigational guide the purpose of the erythrian sea there were records of roots of trade between the Mediterranean world and China in the east uh this document the peripolis was key to us it's proof of trade and cultural cross-pollination across the first and second centuries proof that a merchant could amass such a an Eclectic collection but there were no Rich cultural centers nearby where there was any kind of trade in antiques what was Chicago as big and valuable as this doing after stretch of the East African Coast [Music] we knew the ship was from the first or second century and although the ship's woodwork would have disintegrated we began to uncover what seemed like the personal effects of a ship's crew this is a whole series of plates bowls there's quite a lot of diversity here of shapes and forms look at that that looks like a sailor's plate to me it's a load of coins all accreted together there's some loose ones here as well but that would have been probably in a sack and the whole sack went down and the whole thing's fused together nice isn't it all right you're welcome and then we found something else it was a huge surprise a huge clue my God ah this is a bolt that would have been used in the Keel of a ship the first or second Century A.D and uh this is truly enormous for something of this kind I've only ever seen a few examples from this era but the biggest I've seen have been from uh a Roman wreck from the French coaster at la madrag de Jam uh and that ship was big but this is much bigger and it's uh it's broken at the end you know it's it's sheared off so who knows what the actual size would have been this one bolt meant that we could with the help of our colleagues from Southampton University spend the whole winter recreating how the boat might have been built and and what it might have looked like one of the biggest vessels that we have to compare it to is from south of France and this is a cross-section through the bottom of that vessel that's the Bolt running right the way down there and the one from your site is way way bigger so it's got to be coming off a much much bigger ship so we went through to some of the really standard iconography from the ancient world that gives us this idea of the the recurved how is that's consistent with the madragon it's what they seem to be using on these really really big Merchant ships what we got to with doing that was this so what are we talking lengthwise 60 meters 60 meters 60 meters yeah so really really big and we know vessels that big could have existed you know it's not outside the Realms of the engineering capabilities that they had you know quite a lot of crew on this boat a lot of big heavy Mast sails I thought we'd go a little bit further and start to look at the actual vessel sailing along so we've just taken our basic reconstruction and we've given it the sort of CGI treatment for Hollywood treatment yeah and there it is sailing along and you get a real idea of the scale of this okay even at the yeah the guy just out on the flying Gallery at the front quite simply we were looking at an enormous ship we knew the ship was from well probably from the first or second century and so we knew that we were looking at by far the largest ship from that period to ever have been identified [Music] foreign I was looking for records of an extraordinarily large ship [Music] even though Imports and Export duties would have been levied and recorded very little survives shipping records for the East African Coast during the first and second centuries after Christ had virtually non-existent there was nothing that helped me identify it so I started looking into eyewitness accounts that would have recorded a Monumental ship the great Roman Chronicles like tacitus or Pliny the Elder mentioned nothing neither did the more obscure diarists [Music] so I moved on to Tales of Legend and that's how I discovered the story of our Los qualities as the legend goes amutan was the man freed from slavery and he developed this love of beautiful things and amassed this huge collection of treasures he planned to build a Monumental Palace or a temple to house them all and he built the apistos the largest ship known to man to transport them all on this great Voyage to the temple the ship was struck by a storm or attacked by a giant sea monster depending on what version of the story you read and lost forever in the First Century A.D one of the really popular genres of literature was collections of Marvels collections of interesting things that were said to have happened but how many of these texts tell the truth and the absolute truth is is a very big question I would say it's naive to take the story entirely at face value but I wouldn't say it's naive to think that there is a kernel of Truth in it somewhere but how many pieces of art he had what it was that he had how far he say why he sailed out and all of that is the stuff that will have been legendized in the telling [Music] now to the Mediterranean Legend tells of an Accenture collector's enormous ship and his worldly possessions lost at sea Captain George Knowles has made it his life's work to find the treasure foreign thing to romanticize the story of Hamilton I suppose your common sense would tell you this is just made up this is just a story but then if you actually find proof of it it becomes that much more remarkable because it's actually true [Music] but one or two of the more credulous treasure Hunters of the 20th century took this obscure Legend seriously uh you know I come from a background where we must have proof and we we must have evidence ours is a hunt for knowledge and not treasure any firm details about where the wreck May lie have been lost in the sands of time I started to believe that the wreck had not been found not because it was a myth but because people were looking in the wrong place Captain Knowles swears he will leave no stone unturned until he has found the Lost Treasure Peter's Romanticism I think uh sometimes got the better of him foreign Grace Andy uh yep we're back this year for another six weeks just as long as we can dive forward before the weather changes and the plan is to look at some of the bigger pieces and hopefully bring them up divers standing by with the crane over here this is it [Music] all right [Music] everybody [Music] go ahead and start lifting the surface [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] what you're looking at is the skull of an elephant or great mammoth it looks like it's man-made carved out of marble when the Greeks and Romans discovered fossil remains they informed their popular beliefs and it used to be thought with skulls like this with the large single cavity in the center of the face that these gave birth to or at least justification to the existence of Cyclops and mythological Tales I think it's an incredibly detailed example of the power of of Mythology one thing that excited me about the project is that how you inhabit the past and it's like it's unknowable really but little glimpses and fragments of objects and stories that's what makes you kind of know the past over history has always been Rewritten and Rewritten you know the solidity that we call history is written from fragments what does Rey's spine [Music] wow look you can see how he's oxidized under there he's been there for some time it looks like human features with bestial traits characteristic of the Mesopotamian demon the question is could this be the so-called Pazuzu demon in the 1920s British archaeologists were digging in the upper Tigris Valley of Mesopotamia they discovered a small settlement along the banks of the river and among their finds was thought by some to be ahead of the Babylonian Demon King Pazuzu stylistically they both seem to be of a piece remember when I first saw the demon I was asking myself why am I believing it am I believing it because it's got these missing parts you believe it because it's you know in a history of it traveling through time through thousands of years it's bound to have you know had accidents and mishaps I love the way that time can age it and deteriorate it it's like the action of the world on this object you realize that everything in the world is going to become fragments and then you realize that that's really where belief lies is between fragments for and this could be him and he's beautiful what makes you believe in things is not what's there it's about what's not there foreign clubs demons unicorns it did tell us a little bit about amutan's character [Music] I think you genuinely believed in Monsters who believed in cyclopses he believed in unicorns you know and I just think he was that type of a person and I guess if you believe in them in the beginning then you you know you just you know you create things to justify their existence whether it was this amatan Peter's talking about or whether it's somebody else these are not um objects that are just randomly chosen [Music] foreign but for my money there's certainly somebody with a vision and with a dream a massive dream and a pretty big ego behind all of this [Music] I can't see this as a trading vessel there are very definite aesthetic choices being made here I think if it was trade stuff you'd see multiples of similar things there seems to be more coordinated [Music] obviously Amazon had an idea of an audience and then his dreams were scuppered when the boat sang but now these objects have come back up again I wanted to find a great place to exhibit them the venetians the mass Collections and brought things from Far reaches of the world you know when you look at the four horses in Saint Marks and you realize that they're a massive symbol of Venice and so is the lion but they came from far away lands they weren't really a symbol of Venice they were plundered the lion came from Athens and the four horses came from Constantinople the history of where they came from is lost and they become totally synonymous with Venice yeah it's Andrew uh David should go ahead over here well let's go close the door we've got a little bit of a problem the gold that's great yes we drifted in a strong current over quite a wide area of sea grasses of a big lumps of coral and then we found scattered half buried gold objects on one hand I was thinking that my God this is possible the greatest moment of my career but on the other hand Panic set in because this stuff is worth millions yeah I mean to find as much gold uh is thrilling but for an archaeologist it's a big problem your gut instinct is to to bring up something valuable but we can't do that no no you can't bring it up because then you know we lose my solution is simple I mean you bring this stuff up as soon as you can find work you know this Expedition is not about treasure no no I'm just saying bringing up now that way it's safe we know where it is you're missing the point [Music] the more time goes by the more people will know you want to be able to study why this is from there where it's sitting how the marina is going around there this is are you looking at let's say seven days better we increase the secular security quietly I just think you're naive and thinking they're making his wife you need to trust our judgment on this okay [Music] now I know we're all really excited but you know this goes without saying those confidentiality agreements that you signed they're serious okay no photos absolutely nothing posted on the Internet or any bloody tweets or anything like that the chances are that once it throws this out will just generate all sorts of interest you know from Treasure hunters from from pirates from uh all sorts really what I want to be able to do is to just double the security for the you know the remaining week s there you have a ship but I don't know what is going on but are the people they go there they come back you know you see a lot of villagers here they saw that maybe they'd search for something like a baby gasoline petrol some friends they told me that they see big like a sculpture like a woman they sit down on the sea there what I'd like to do is just give a briefing on what we want to achieve this morning ready uh we're going to load the pucker up first and we're going to put all the lift bags all the robes and the gear for most of the divers onto the packet and we're going to send it out okay any questions on that so today's big day we've decided after much deliberation to bring the gold items up okay over and out [Music] see here it comes [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] right I don't think anyone could ever imagine that something like this would happen to them you dream about it but do you honestly believe that it will probably not let's move straight into the water yep I mean the amazing thing about the gold works that were found is that gold doesn't tarnish so they're totally timeless it's shiny and it's sort of dancing in your eyes you see it in movies the guy opens the case and this gold Shines on their faces foreign [Music] objects made of gold I mean it's collector it was obviously obsessed with his material gold makes people do crazy things you know it has done for years you know there's a lot of blood associated with gold you know gold can drive people mad I mean who's to say what makes it like that is it's Rarity it's scarcity or is it you know is it something you know naturally inside the metal itself let's do it unbelievable you got it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's it's interesting that the gold was found on its own I think that indicates to me that maybe it they tried to escape with the goals you know the ship was definitely going down it was irreparably damaged and they thought the goal was worth the risk of putting in a smaller boat and trying to escape with if you rely on myth if you rely on Legend people tend to not take you very seriously but this vast amount of gold suddenly made my story come to life at this point I was prepared to go out on a limb by saying that what we had found was indeed armotan's treasure [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] one of the divers uncovered a huge Golden Disc and it was found in an area where we found many of the other gold items but it was completely covered with silts and uh obviously there's pressure now to bring it up as soon as possible Andy the weather's picked up a bit right we weren't expecting anywhere in any wind today it was yeah it's just picked up how long is it gonna be before we know we just take an hour by hour and see if see what the weather does I've stopped all operations it's a very quickly we'll postpone until tomorrow hopefully the weather we left a minimal crew on the boat for now just to keep it safe and we're waiting for the weather to clear it's not looking like it's clearing is it importantly released the gold disc as soon as possible to me it's the clearest indication yet that we have found Amazon's Treasures in later versions of the amortan myth the hero gets visited by the goddess Artemis who instructs him to build a temple to the sun god Apollo and that becomes his motivation to collect the great Treasures of the old world this story was told after Christianity took hold and can be read as a warning against embracing the old pagan gods amatan punished for worshiping full idols Gods going back to the earliest civilization must have been a night like this that it all ended for Amazon that's the other stuff loaded with Amazon's collection coming up against a storm like this [Music] the sun is back the Sun gonna Polo is with us [Music] [Music] I believe what we're lifting today isn't just a gold disc it's evidence of solar worship an image of the Sun a sundisk [Music] SanDisk has been used by many civilizations and cultures to venerate the God of the Sun by literally reflecting his face the Egyptians and inconsistent the the Japanese and the accounts the ancient Egyptians believed the sun's daily pattern of regeneration suggested their own Rising after death this was a symbolic of the sun's power give life to take away [Music] I think that the sun this is a centerpiece for harmattan's temple to the sun got Apollo and the other items that we found it were to fill the temple [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] uh welcome everyone the good news is with just a few more things to bring up tomorrow we have retrieved 82 items uh the bad news is it seems there's nothing else down there so our work is over well what about the drop-off uh yes we have a drop off here the depth drops down to 60 to 100 meters so Legend has it that there were a hundred objects in the boat because we've got 15 or so missing um perhaps we should look there you know the side scan didn't pick anything up well perhaps we didn't scan further enough into the drop off yeah I mean we know that ship is driven from the deep water onto the reef because of the way that the cargo's Spilled Out I'm really happy I mean Peter you should be very happy I am it just feels like the end is missing to go home now knowing that there is an area that I have looked at it's just it doesn't sit right we've got two more days yes we've got two more days but um you know we've got an awful lot to do I don't really want to start investigating another area um you know well it's not in other area it's the drop-off we know where it is okay Peter would like us to explore further into the drop-off which we have scanned and we didn't find anything if we're not coming back shouldn't we make sure that we've checked everywhere we're just going to have one last look in the Deep drop off I know that this is a long shot you know okay here we go how deep are we 60 60 now we're moving North loads of marine snow let's give it a minute sorry guys this is far from great but this is I'm trying to make a loop and sort of go back what are these things that's pretty much just broken oh it was something you saw something yes I can't see it yes okay he's trying he's trying foreign yes absolutely what is that Jesus that is part of the figure there it is look at that two figures so we're coming back next year I guess well the first thing that came to me was the title Treasures from the wreck of the unbelievable I started thinking of it as a sort of statement so it's like Treasures from the wreck of the unbelievable like it's kind of something inside your mind like the unbelievable is a place in your mind [Music] you know years ago when I was a student I was living in a squat in white heart laying some mates in my bedroom I could hear a guy who lived next door and I could hear him through the wall and then I stopped hearing him we thought maybe something had happened and then after I didn't hear him for about a week I got my friends and I said look come on let's go and have a look so kicked both doors down and then went in there we actually went in first of all because we thought maybe you died it was like the whole room was just filled with stuff nobody in there to find out later it was called Mr Barnes but at the time I didn't know what it was called he was one of those guys that went around like with the shopping trolley and the bags and he'd collect things he didn't bring him back so it's like a hoarder the rooms were piled high with stuff and I went to the top of these piles and I excavated through the piles and I found like every toothpaste tube we'd ever used money wrapped up in bags you know lots of magazines from like the 40s and the 20s it was like a whole bag of 50ps and then a bag of two peas he had a collection of like clocks you sort of converted them painted and mended them it was like 60 years of existence in one space I don't know something about this man that I got to know going through the time there were like layers of you know geography going through them but when we got to the table I found a normal man then you just put objects on a table and put objects on a table until they'd kind of lost his mind or lost touch with civilization and created this huge collection I mean in a way it becomes an infatuation when you discover something like this and you try and get inside the mind of somebody who no longer exists you start to go on this journey and then you kind of get lost in it [Music] with any story I think you get interested in you know the characters you know I'm a collector and I'm an artist I understand all those things about money and collecting and you know they're you know the kind of addiction of it looking at Amazon through his collection and through his objects he was a collector like today's collectors are I think that he begged and borrowed and commissioned and stole to amass this collection okay welcome everybody we're going to be diving a little bit deeper this year we're going to be diving down to 60 meters so uh all the usual procedures will apply and we have a new diver this year his name's Peter we are going to do this as an assisted dive okay let's hit that drop off foreign [Music] [Music] foreign to this depth for the first time is strange enough these figures like they've always been there and because you can float around them at any height you sort of forget how big they actually are [Music] [Music] you know I like the fact that Amazon was kind of nuts on the scale of what he tried to do she seems kind of arrogant in lots of ways and then he seems foolish in lots of other ways but above it all he seems driven to amass this collection so we've identified three perhaps four sculptures in deep water because of their depth and because of the size we we really want to bring them up as soon as we can you know this piece we estimated to the way up to upwards of 30 tons if we've already had a few divers down to have a scout to see you know how we might lift it the idea is to have that as your main lifting Point yeah then you have secondary lifting points to this foreign [Music] there's been a huge amount of planning in this because we don't even know how fragile it is I mean just the scale of it and the fact that it survived this long potentially uh means it must be a very fine casting something in place I hope so a bit worried a bit nervous well the worst case scenario is that we've underestimated the weight of us crane over here this is just a worrying moment as the crane takes over from the lift bags [Music] doing more work than the lift bags now I feel the barge listing slightly [Music] do I think the enormous ship of Legends existed it's completely impossible to say whether this ship that ended up here was was the apostas um it it certainly chimes with the legends and it would have been similar in scale to the legend but we'll never know I know that not all the pieces of the puzzle are here I'm very aware about it but I think we have enough pieces of the puzzle to support a story [Music] you think about the whole story it's unbelievable to start with but most things from history do seem very hard to believe [Music] you know you look at the Venus de Milo and look at the way the arms are cut off on it and you think somebody must have done that on purpose [Music] [Laughter] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] for me the whole exhibition is about belief [Music] in the past belief in God living gods are not believing [Music] and belief is a strange thing because there's no absolute truth I still have the answers science doesn't have the answers religion doesn't have the answers [Music] somehow collectively we create some kind of a truth and whether you believe in anything or not I think we need something [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: HENI Talks

Views: 1,092,503

Keywords: heni, talks, art, history, HENI, Talks, Damien Hirst, Treasure, Shipwreck, Money, Diving, Sea, Venice, Ancient, Artist, YBA, Shark, Gold

Id: 13ShK2UAeP0

Length: 82min 18sec (4938 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023