Deep-time decay

Type | Sculpture Installation   Year | 2023    Project site | Amsterdam, Netherlands

Client | Competition entry for Amsterdam Light Festival 

The image of Amsterdam is unstable. From the first dam on the Amstel to the Oranjesluizen, this city has continually evolved its shape by integrating complex infrastructure into its landscape. Water is held back, leaving a dry space below for the city to push upwards — an ever-changing master plan. Dikes and Dams fight for a few meters above the floating line, allowing the city's elegant silhouette of pinnacles, towers, and spires to cast its shadows over the clouds of a rainy day in Amsterdam. Together with its many icons, this vertical ritual shapes Amsterdam's identity, and we imagined an installation to visualize it. Light becomes the vertical movement of water, first emerging from the canal's depths. By paying homage to the city's infrastructure, our proposal represents the ritual of patchwork, trial and error, failure, learning, and resiliency that shaped Amsterdam's image over the centuries.

The installation emerges from the water and consists of three light components: a submerged volume of air, a sculptural piping assemblage made from reused piping waste, and an elevated volume of water. Together, these three components form a continuum of light, which suggests movement from below the water to above. It reminds me of a lighthouse, a tower, a candle. At night, a glow emerges from within the canal, intriguing passersby. This light follows the piping structure, shining intensely towards the sky. The tank glows like a beacon against the dark.