Heba Y. Amin participated in Ars Electronica Festival 2026, held in Linz, Austria, from September 9 to 13, with Operation Sunken Sea, her ongoing research-based project. Presented as part of the festival’s Festival Walk: Negotiating the Real programme, the work was shown on Level 0 of Francisco Carolinum.
Developed since 2018, Operation Sunken Sea draws on early twentieth-century proposals to drain the Mediterranean and merge Europe and Africa into a single supercontinent, including the German architect Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa project. By revisiting these techno-utopian visions, Amin exposes the political and ecological violence underlying ideas of progress, control, and the remaking of geographical space.
Through the critical appropriation of the visual and rhetorical language of authoritarian regimes, the artist reverses established narratives of historical power. Approaching these proposals from an Afro-Arab perspective, the project questions who has the authority to imagine and define the future, challenging colonial notions of progress and examining the political, economic, and ecological consequences of technological intervention.
Operation Sunken Sea (2018) approaches the Mediterranean not as a fixed geographical boundary but as a space subject to transformation through shifting relations of power. Through the speculative reinterpretation of historical utopias, Amin investigates how authority over geography, representation, and the future is constructed and contested.
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