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

thank you foreigner and I guess we're all looking for a true story that makes sense, but I think what makes you believe in things is not what is there, it's about what is not there, you know, to begin with, it's incredible, but that It makes you believe it. Abroad, the expedition began in 2010. We brought together a group of expert ecological consultants to advise on how to avoid damage to the site and representatives of the host country to safeguard their interests and monitor what happened to everything we found. We had spent the summer of 2009 remotely mapping the From the surface, it was clear from our scans that there was something down there, but there was no clear indication of what it was.

I've been doing this work for almost 30 years and I wasn't about to jump to conclusions. Yes, very good, welcome everyone, my name is Andrew and I am the project manager on this expedition. This gentleman is the Piatric Clinic. He is a maritime archaeologist with extraordinary diving experience. You'll be leading the underwater team alongside Bruce who will be in In Charge of the Divers, so we're going to start with the ground truth on the major geophysics anomalies and as you can see we have a lot of artifacts spread out over a large area with the main groups here, here and here, no sign of a ship. uh, which could indicate that the

wreck

is early and that the hull has completely disintegrated, but keep an eye out for any hull structures that we may have missed.

Don't forget to record your locations as you work and stay in communication with the surface team in this phase of the Expedition is what we call a pre-distant survey and this is mainly to establish in detail what it is and how much is down there foreign foreign foreign started for me in 2008. I was in the middle of my doctoral thesis, I mean in the middle I hadn't really written anything in a couple of months and I was running out of funds and then I discovered the clip on the Internet. I assumed it was posted by a backpacker or a tourist, someone like that, as much as you can. see a beach, I assumed it was from East Africa and a fishing community and the clip was titled fisherman discovers a statue, a group of fishermen pulled something out of the net, it looked like a curled up monkey fetus, you see something coming out of the water and you don't You can Explain to me what an adventure is if you want to know more.

I thought that if these fishermen found one thing, it stands to reason that there is more down there, so I wanted to find this beach and I wanted to talk to this vision. I'm here as soon as I saw it because I've seen it so many times in the video. The fishermen said they had returned to see if there was anything else out there. They couldn't find anything, so after much negotiation they took us to where they said. They figured it out, you think of the right place, yeah, the first day we go to this island, it's this place I go in, I dive, I die for hours to finish, you find anything, oh, that was nothing again, no, It took us days because it was a blind search. nothing here, patience, yes, yes, okay, we almost gave up, it was the fifth day when my GoPro was on, it dropped half an hour of searching, done, finally yes, are you sure, yes, yes, yes.

Peter sent me the images showing what looked like a classical sculpture that had been placed. at the bottom of the sea for a considerable period of time, we knew it was worth pursuing, but it was going to be difficult to get funding through the usual channels. There was controversy in the modern art world over creating a diamond-encrusted skull in a revolution. Bold and shameless artist. Damien Hurst is putting more than 200 new pieces up for auction. Lot number one, three hundred thousand, thank you, bag, mouth open, amazed, all expectations, that's a penny for a pickle. One of the people we approached was an artist who had just been in the news I didn't know much about him to me, he was the shark guy that at the auction where I sold all my works, you know, this big three day sale and it really was the point where all the work became commodity and it was like you know it just seemed like you do something sell it do something sell it do something sell it it seems like it seemed unsustainable and unsatisfactory facts some reason after that auction it seemed like something was over and something new was beginning the new era in its exploration of inner space I love fantasy stories about ship

wreck

s when I was a child you know I just love the owners who cover this Earth, comes the story of husbands, chills, horror thrill , further away I prepared all those old movies about

treasures

found under the sea in these waters.

It is a treasure worth a fortune in gold. I am void of the sea because it is an element that is foreign to it. It's like you know it's like another planet on our own planet. Well, the ocean is the last of Earth's great unexplored frontiers to find a title sponsor so soon I had money and an interest that was incredible, I was basically prepared to make a bet. I think everything I've done has been a gamble, but I definitely wasn't tempted to put on a wetsuit because I think The Sharks would eat me foreign support.

Go ahead, we knew from the scans that there was a lot of stuff down there, but what we discovered was much bigger and more disconcerting than we expected. The amazing thing is how it integrates into the reef and actually seeing the corals and everything that grows on them and the fish that are attached to them, but it's still a sculpture, it's not like anything you've seen before. It's strange to find something that hasn't been seen for lifetimes, it's almost like you know how to find something in its natural habitat, that's what's exciting about the whole project, to somehow claim it, but it hasn't claimed it all yet, so it's like If there was the beauty of nature and the beauty of sculpture side by side, it's kind of extraordinary.

The garden is like some kind of strange Victorian underworld grotto. Corals take many years to develop and you start to wonder how long these things have been done here. You have so many questions in your mind about how to do it. they got there how they were made who possibly made them and what size ship was carrying them why they came through this area opens up so many questions it's a huge piece that's just spread out over a pretty wide area buried at different angles the sun really there is no sense of what happened because there is no sense of accident it is a shipwreck it is several it is a mystery I am just saying it is a foreign mystery the first few weeks we have a fascinating range of artefacts developing a wide range of dates, the selection of different styles of Providence suggests that this could be the contents of a merchant ship, we have nothing yet to pinpoint a specific date, today we will start working with the airlift, it is basically a vacuuming device. the sea floor takes away the lighter materials and the sand turns into sediment, you know, for the first time in possibly centuries, you know we're disturbing what's under the sand, it could be a lot weirder at the bottom.

I just saw something accumulating in the sand. You work in the least expected moments, you discover an assumption that is crucial, guys, look at this, okay, what is it? It's Roman. Wow, fantastic. It is Nero ad54-68. First Roman century. It's like you have a date. A great moment. A great moment for us. The picture. It's starting to become a lot clearer now, this is great, exactly the kind of things we would need to find date back to the rule of Emperor Nero, so we know for sure that the ship couldn't have sunk before 54 AD. and I'm trying to get the A little bit important up here where it is there it's perfect and you see it Nero so if we're talking about a shipwreck from between the mid-1st century and the mid-2nd century AD.

During this period there was a Roman market in plunder from the previous classic. cities and a market for artifacts from Egypt and, of course, in the 1st century navigation guide, the purpose of the Erythrian Sea, there were records of the roots of trade between the Mediterranean world and China in the east. This document, the peripolis, was key for us, it is proof. of trade and cultural cross-pollination throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries, proof that a merchant could amass such an eclectic collection, but there were no rich cultural centers nearby where there was any kind of antiquities trade.

What was Chicago so big and valuable like this? When traveling along a stretch of the east coast of Africa we learned that the ship was from the 1st or 2nd century and although the wood of the ship would have disintegrated we began to discover what seemed to be the personal effects of the crew of a ship: it is all a series of plates, bowls, there is Here there is quite a diversity of shapes and forms. Look, that looks like a sailor's dish to me. It's a lot of coins all together. There are some loose ones here too, but it probably would have been in a sack and the whole sack was gone. down and everything merged nicely, isn't it good?

You're welcome and then we found something else, it was a big surprise, a big clue, oh my gosh, ah, this is a bolt that would have been used in the keel of a ship. from the first or second century AD. and this is really huge for something of this type. I have only seen a few examples from this era, but the largest ones I have seen have been from a Roman shipwreck off the French coast at the Madrag. from Jam, and that ship was big, but this one is much bigger and it's broken at the end, you know, it's cut up, so who knows what the actual size would have been.

This bolt meant that we were able to with the help of our colleagues. from the University of Southampton spend all winter recreating how the ship might have been built and what it might have looked like. One of the larger ships we have to compare it to is from the south of France and this is a cross section of the bottom. of that ship which is the Bolt running right down there and the one on your site is much larger so it must come from a much larger ship so we went through some of the really standard iconography of the ancient world that gives us this idea of the recurve, how it's consistent with the madragon, is what they seem to be using on these really big merchant ships, what we did was this, so what are we talking about throughout? 60 meters 60 meters 60 meters Yes, really very big and we know that boats that big could have existed.

You know it's not outside the realms of engineering capabilities that they had. You meet a lot of crew on this ship. Lots of big, heavy mast sails. I thought we would do it. go a little further and start looking at the actual ship sailing, so we just took our basic reconstruction and gave it the kind of CGI treatment for the Hollywood treatment, yeah, and there it is sailing and you get a real image. idea of ​​the scale of this, okay, even at the time, yeah, the guy that was in the flying gallery in the front, we were just looking at a huge ship that we knew was the ship, probably from the first or second century, so we knew.

We were looking at by far the largest ship of that period that has ever been identified abroad. I was looking for records for an extraordinarily large ship, although import and export duties would have been applied and recorded, very little survives shipping records for the east coast of Africa. During the first and second centuries after Christ was virtually non-existent, there was nothing to help me identify him, so I began searching for eyewitness accounts that would have recorded a monumental ship. The great Roman Chronicles like Tacitus or Pliny the Elder didn't mention anything, nor did the more obscure chroniclers, so I turned to Tales of Legend and that's how I discovered the story of our qualities.

According to legend, Amutan was the man freed from slavery and developed this love for beautiful things and amassed this huge collection of

treasures

that he planned. to build a Monumental Palace or a temple to house them all and built the apistos the largest ship known to man to transport them all on this great Journey to the temple the ship was hit by a storm or attacked by a giant sea monster depending on Which version of history did you read and lose forever in the first century AD? One of the really popular literary genres were the Marvel collections, collections of interesting things that were said to have happened, but how many of these texts tell the truth and the absolute truth?

This is a very important question. I would say it's naive to take the story at face value, but I wouldn't say it's naive to think there's a kernel of Truth somewhere, but how many works of art did he have? that he reached where, he said why he set sail and all that is what will have become a legend when told now in 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 strange treasure to romanticize the story of Hamilton.

I guess your common sense would tell you that this is simply a fabrication, this is just a story, but then if you actually find evidence for it, it becomes that much more remarkable because it's actually true, but one or two of the treasure hunters most gullible of the 20th centuryThey took this dark legend seriously. You know, I come from a background where we must have proof and we must have proof that our search is for knowledge and not for treasure. Any firm details about where the wreck is located may have been lost to the sands of time.

I began 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 that he will leave nothing behind. stone unturned until he found the lost treasure Peter's romanticism I think he got the better of him sometimes the foreigner Grace Andy uh yeah We're back this year for another six weeks, as long as we can dive before the weather changes and the plan is to look at some of the bigger pieces and hopefully bringing them to light. The divers who are waiting with the crane here, this is it.

Alright, everyone go ahead and start raising the surface. Thank you foreigner. What you are seeing is the skull of an elephant or a large mammoth. It seems that it was carved from marble by man. When the Greeks and Romans discovered fossil remains, they informed their popular beliefs and it was often thought that skulls like this one with the large single cavity in the center of the face gave rise to or at least justified the existence of the Cyclopes and mythological tales. I think it's an incredibly detailed example of power. of Mythology, one thing that excited me about the project is the way you inhabit the past and it's like it's really unknowable, but little glimpses and fragments of objects and stories, that's what lets you know that the past throughout History has always been rewritten and rewritten.

You know the solidity that we call history is written from fragments what does Rey's spine look like wow you can see how it rusts down there it has been there for some time it looks like human features with bestial features characteristic of the Mesopotamian demon the question is: could this be? be the so-called demon Pazuzu in the 1920s, British archaeologists were excavating in the upper Tigris valley in Mesopotamia and discovered a small settlement along the banks of the river and among their finds some thought it was stylistically ahead of the king Babylonian demon Pazuzu. They both appear to be of one piece.

Do you remember when I saw the demon for the first time. I was wondering why I believe that. I believe it because it is missing these parts. You believe it because you know it in a story that travels through time. Thousands of years there will surely have been accidents and mishaps. I love the way time can age and deteriorate it. It is 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, it's between fragments, and this could be it and it's beautiful, which makes you believe in things It's not what's there, it's about what's not there, foreign clubs, demons, unicorns, he told us a little about the character of Amutan, I think.

You really believed in monsters, he believed in cyclops, he believed in unicorns, you know, and I think he was that kind of person and I guess if you believe in them at first, then you know, you just know, you believe things to justify. its existence, whether it is this amatan that Peter

talks

about or whether it is someone else, these are not foreign objects chosen at random, but for my money, there is certainly someone with a vision and a dream, a huge dream and a pretty big ego behind it of everything. I can't see this as a commercial ship, there are very definite aesthetic decisions being made here.

I think if it was commercial stuff you'd see multiple similar things, there seems to be more coordination, obviously Amazon had an idea of ​​an audience. and then his dreams were ruined when the ship sang, but now these objects have appeared again. I wanted to find a great place to display them. The Venetians, the massive collections and things brought from far away parts of the world, you know it when you look at the. four horses in San Marco and you realize that they are a huge symbol of Venice and so is the lion but they came from distant lands they were not really a symbol of Venice they were looted the lion came from Athens and the four horses came from Constantinople , the story of where they came from is lost and they become totally synonymous with Venice, yes, it's Andrew, uh, David should move on here, well, let's close the door, we have a little problem, the gold, that's great, yes.

We drifted in a strong current over a fairly wide area of ​​sea grass and large chunks of coral and then found scattered gold objects half buried on one side. I was thinking that my God, this is possibly the biggest moment of my career, but in the other. On the other hand, panic set in because these things are worth millions, yes, I mean, finding the most gold, it's exciting, but for an archaeologist it's a big problem, your instinct is to bring up something valuable, but we can't do it , no no. I can't mention it because then you know we lose.

My solution is simple. I mean, you mention these things as soon as you can find a job. You know this expedition isn't about treasure, no, I'm just saying mention it like that now. it's safe, we know where it is, you're missing the point, the more time passes the more people will know that you want to be able to study why this is from there, where it is, how the marina is doing, this is, are you looking? Let's say that seven days we better increase secular security silently. I just think you're naive and think they're making his wife, you should trust our judgment on this, okay, now I know we're all very excited, but you know this goes. not to mention those NDAs you signed, they are serious, okay, no photos, absolutely nothing posted on the internet or any damn tweets or anything like that, chances are once this is thrown out it will just spawn everything interest rate, you know, of treasure hunters. from pirates of all kinds really what I want to be able to do is just double the security for, you know, the remaining weeks there you have a ship, but I don't know what's going on, but are the people that they?

They go there they come back you know you see many villagers here they saw that maybe they would look for something like a baby gasoline gasoline some friends told me that they see big as a sculpture like a woman they sit in the sea There, what I would like to do is simply give a session informative about what we want to achieve this morning. Ready, first we're going to load the gathering and we're going to place all the lift bags, all the gowns and equipment. for most of the divers in the package and we are going to send it, okay, any questions about that, so on the big day today, we have decided, after much deliberation, to bring the gold items, okay, and look , here comes foreigner, right?

I don't think anyone could imagine something like that would happen to them. You dream about it, but do you honestly think you probably won't? Let's go straight to the water. Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing about the gold works that were found is that gold doesn't tarnish so they are totally timeless it's shiny and it's like dancing in your eyes you see it in the movies the guy opens the box and this gold shines in his expensive strange objects made of gold I mean he was a collector obviously obsessed with his material, gold makes people do crazy things, you know it has for years, you know there is a lot of blood associated with gold, you know that gold It can drive people crazy, I mean, who can say what makes it so is its rarity, its scarcity. or you know it, it's something you know naturally within the metal itself, let's make it awesome, you got it overseas, it's interesting that the gold was found on its own, I think that tells me that maybe they tried to escape with the targets. you know the ship was definitely sinking, it was irreparably damaged and they thought the target was worth the risk of putting it in a smaller boat and trying to escape if you trust the myth, if you trust the legend, people tend not to take you very seriously. but this large amount of gold suddenly made my story come alive.

At that point I was willing to go out on a limb and say that what we had found was actually Armotan's treasure. One of the divers discovered 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 in sediment and obviously there is pressure now to unearth it as soon as possible. Andy, the weather got a little better, we weren't expecting any places in If it was windy today, yeah, it just picked up. How long will it be before we know? We just take an hour by hour and see what the weather is like.

I stopped all operations, it's too fast, we'll postpone it until tomorrow. Hopefully the weather left a skeleton crew on the boat for now just to keep it safe and we are waiting for the weather to improve. It doesn't look like it's clearing. It's important that I released the gold record as soon as possible for me. It is the clearest. Still an indication that we have found the Amazon Treasures in later versions of the Amortan myth, the hero is visited by the goddess Artemis, who orders him to build a temple for the sun god Apollo and that becomes his motivation to collect the great treasures of the old world in this The story was told after Christianity took hold and can be read as a warning against accepting the old pagan gods.

Amatan was punished for worshiping complete idols. The gods going back to the earliest civilization must have been a night like this when it was all over for Amazon, that's the other thing. loaded with the Amazon collection facing a storm like this the sun has returned the sun is going to be Pole with us I think what we raise today is not just a golden record it is evidence of solar worship an image of the Sun a SanDisk solar disk Ha It has been used by many civilizations and cultures to worship the Sun God, literally reflecting his face.

The Egyptians and the Japanese and inconsistent accounts, the ancient Egyptians believed that the sun's daily pattern of regeneration suggested its own rising after death, this was a symbol. from the power of the sun give life to take away I think the sun this is a centerpiece for the harmattan temple to the sun got Apollo and the other items we found were to fill the foreign temple thank you uh welcome everyone the good news is with Solo a few more things to mention tomorrow. We have recovered 82 items. The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be anything else down there, so our job is done.

What about the descent? Yes, we have a drop here. The depth decreases. at 60 to 100 meters, so legend says that there were a hundred objects on the ship because we are missing about 15. Maybe we should look there. You know, the side scan didn't detect anything. Well, maybe we didn't. Scan far enough into the drop, yes, I mean, we know that the ship is driven from the deep waters towards the reef because of the way the cargo was spilled. I'm very happy, I mean, Peter, you should be very happy. It just feels. like the end is missing to go home now knowing that there is an area that I have looked at it just doesn't fit well we have two more days yes, we have two more days but you know we have I have a lot to do I really don't want to start researching another area. um, you know well, it's not in another area, it's the descent.

We know where it is good. Peter would like us to explore the descent further, which we have scanned and found nothing. If we don't come back, shouldn't we make sure we've checked all the places? Let's just take one last look at the deep drop. I know this is a long shot, you know, okay, here we go, what depth are we at 60 60 now we're moving north, lots of marine snow, let's give it a minute, sorry guys, this is far from it. cool, but I'm trying to loop and something. go back what are these things that are practically broken oh was it something you saw something yes I can't see it yes it's okay he's trying he's trying strange yes absolutely what is that Jesus that is part of the figure there he is look at that two figures, so We will be back next year.

I guess the first thing that came to mind was the title Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. I started to think of it as a kind of statement, so it's like Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. as if it were something inside your mind, as if the incredible was a place in your mind, you know, years ago, when I was a student, I lived in a white-hearted squat, putting some mates in my room, I could hear a boy who lived next door. and I could hear it through the wall and then I stopped hearing it, we thought maybe something had happened and then after I didn't hear it for about a week I called my friends and said look come on let's go cast A look.

I kicked down both doors and then we went in there, we actually went in first because we thought maybe you had died, it was like the whole room was full of stuff, no one there found out later, his name was Mr. Barnes, but in At that time I didn't know his name, he was one of those guys who walked around with the shopping cart and bags and collected things that I didn't bring him, so he was like a hoarder, the rooms were full of things. and I went to the top of thesepiles and I dug through the piles and found like in every tube of toothpaste that we had used money wrapped in bags, you know, a lot of magazines from the '40s and '20s, it was like a whole bag. of 50ps and then a bag of two peas.

He had a collection of similar watches. You converted them, painted them and repaired them. It was like 60 years of existence in one space. I don't know anything about this man I met going there. Over time, there were like layers of you know geography running through them, but when we got to the table I found a normal guy and then you just put objects on a table and put objects on a table until they went crazy or you lost contact with civilization and created this huge collection. I mean, in a way, it becomes a crush when you discover something like this and you try to get into the mind of someone who doesn't exist anymore, you start going on this journey and then you kind of get lost in it with whatever story.

I think you're interested, 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 what they are, you know the kind of addiction that comes with looking at Amazon through its collection and through its objects, He was a collector as collectors are today. I believe he begged, borrowed, commissioned and stole to amass this collection. Well, welcome everyone. Let's go a little deeper this year. at 60 meters so all the usual procedures will apply and we have a new diver this year his name is Peter we are going to do this as an assisted dive okay let's hit that foreign drop at this depth for the first time it's already quite strange.

These figures seem to have always been there and since you can float around them at any height, you forget how big they really are. You know, I like the fact that Amazon was a little crazy in the scale of what he tried to do. He seems a little arrogant in a lot of ways and then he seems silly in a lot of other ways, but mostly he seems driven to amass this collection, so we've identified three, maybe four, deep water sculptures because of their depth and their size. We really want to get them out there as soon as we can.

Get to know this piece. We estimate that it weighs more than 30 tons. Yes we have already had some divers down to have a scout to see how we could lift. If the idea is to have that as your primary elevation point, yes, then you have secondary elevation points for this exterior. There's been a huge amount of planning that went into this because we don't even know how fragile it is, I'm just talking about the scale of it and the fact that it's survived this long potentially means it must be a very good release, something in place, I hope. be a little worried, a little nervous, well the worst case scenario is that we have underestimated the weight of our crane here, this is just a worrying moment when the crane takes over from the lifting bags doing more work than the lifting bags .

Now I feel the barge tilt slightly. I think the huge ship from Legends existed. It is completely impossible to say if this ship that ended up here was the Apostas um, it certainly fits the legends and would have been similar in scale to the legend, but we will never know. I know that not all the pieces of the puzzle are here. I'm very aware of it, but I think so. enough pieces of the puzzle to support a story, you think about the whole story, it's incredible to begin with, but most of the things in the story seem very hard to believe, you know, you look at the Venus de Milo and see the way they cut together the arms. in it and you think someone must have done that on purpose foreigner thank you foreigner foreigner thank you foreigner for me the whole exposition is about belief in the past belief in God the living gods do not believe and belief is a strange thing because there is no absolute truth I still have the answers science doesn't have the answers religion doesn't have the answers somehow we collectively create some kind of truth and whether you believe in something or not, I think we need something strange, foreign, foreign.