Defiantly flipping off both middle fingers, a mermaid made of recovered metal scraps with hair fashioned out of red plastic tubes was lowered into murky green waters outside Sweden’s capital Stockholm on a recent windy spring day.
They are all part of the “Atlantis” art project, which aims to “create an underwater city of the world’s most famous buildings”, project manager Fredrik Johansson says.
All the sculptures are made from scrap recovered by his organisation Hands2Ocean, which picks up rubbish dropped in the waters around Stockholm.
Johansson says that in the six years he has been doing Hands2Ocean, they have collected 43 tonnes (42.3 tons) of batteries, 44 tonnes of electric scooters, 180 tonnes of tyres and more. In total, the organisation has picked up 400 tonnes of scrap.