The car covered with coral reef was a unique art installation created for Gdynia Design Days Festival by two visual artists.

Playing with the 2022 festival’s themes around the ocean and climate change, the artists created a vision of an artificial reef, using a real Porsche 911 and a dream-like narrative imagining how this precious car might have been abandoned to the sea for ages. The story was inspired by ancient myths about mermaids and sailors who fell in love.

After the installation was taken down, artists came out with an idea to actually shoot this story, so they asked Porsche if they were interested in funding it.

Porsche gave the artists budget for the movie and total freedom in creating it.

The objectives of the project, which was an art branding since the beginning, were to gain interest of new target groups, and increase user sensitivity by engaging art.

Directors of Sunken Romance are two young artists, who connected because of love to automotive, moving image and storytelling. To create this film, they engaged the best people in the country to work with - among others - the main mermaid actress, who is an international model or rising world star composer of classical music. With a lot of faith in this project and enormous devotion, they pushed it towards mysterious fairy tale. Blending together great automotive shots with old polish beliefs, blurring the line between what is real and what remains abstract, they came up with this imaginary, suspended in undefined time picture.

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.

When the finished piece, entitled ‘Sunken Romance’, was first revealed at the Gdynia Design Days Festival, hoisted over the harbour by a crane, onlookers were understandably taken in. People were running towards it from all directions, pulling out their phones to take photos. The installation quickly became an internet sensation among Porsche fans and the wider artistic community. To follow up on this success and immortalize the coral reef 911, artists created a short film that imagined the origins story of ‘Sunken Romance’, displayed worldwide in 830 Porsche Dealerships.