Porphyrios charts an imagined convergence between a scuba diver and a Mediterranean fin whale—the second-largest animal on Earth. The title refers to Porphyrios, “the Purple One,” a celebrated sixth-century sea creature said to have attacked and sunk ships in the eastern Mediterranean, anticipating the disruptive encounters between vessels and orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar today.
Descending through the water as though entering a hypnotic dream, the diver asks the whale: “What would you like to do?” Lutyens first received this interspecies question while working under the guidance of plant medicines in the Amazon. The whale responds through a sequence of infrasonic calls.
The work incorporates recordings made in the Mediterranean by CIBRA—the Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali. The calls of fin whales are characterized by descending frequencies, or “downsweeps,” extending from approximately 30 Hz to 18 Hz, much of which lies at the threshold of human hearing.
To create the possibility of a dialogue, the diver’s speech is slowed while the whale’s communication is accelerated, bringing the two into a shared audible register. While scientific initiatives such as Project CETI and the Earth Species Project employ artificial intelligence in the effort to decipher animal communication, Porphyrios unfolds on a mythical aquatic stage. Rather than claiming to translate the whale, it imagines an encounter: a call and response between two forms of consciousness.
Lutyens’s relationship with the sea reaches back to his childhood near Port Lligat, the home of Salvador Dalí, and to summers spent windsurfing alongside a local dolphin in the Gulf of Roses. More recently, he has collaborated with marine biologists Dr. Milton Love and Dr. Ann Bull on research into the marine ecosystems that develop around offshore oil platforms, undertaken in connection with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative in California.
Porphyrios was created for A Yellow Sun, a Green Sun, a Yellow Sun, a Red Sun, a Blue Sun: Echoes through the Mediterraneans, the opening program of MAXXI Med, and was presented at MAXXI in Rome in May 2024. The project was organized by Chiara Ianeselli.
Sound score and audio production: Aaron Drake
Artist: Marcos Lutyens
Courtesy: Galerie Alberta Pane