Just off the coast of Morocco, the Canary Islands play host to tourists from across the European Union. Making a short flight for watersports, fresh fish, or just the sun and sand, increasing numbers of EU tourists strain the carrying capacity of this island archipelago as they anxiously cancel trips to the Middle East. In the middle of this, the northernmost island of Lanzarote installed the Museo Atlantico, an underwater sculpture museum designed to attract and redefine dive tourism as much as “enhance” the marine ecology of the island. Rennie, interested in the ways in which dive tourism situates itself as an environmental, scientific, or socio-political project, spent two months conducting interviews and surveys around the island in the hopes of describing the phenomena of diving artificial reefs. 

The Museo Atlantico references local and global socio-political events, managed by the local tourism board.

Rennie is incorporating the island’s local environmental design spaces into her thesis