Mariko HORI
Under the Harbour
installation / diving ball shaped device, air pomp, ceramic caps, epoxy and found objects / 2021
Is there any place where could have kept a certain amount of fragments of the city throughout the history ?
For example, ‘under the harbor’ could consists of not only water but also everything which had existed at Oosterdok and been decomposed up till this very moment, such as construction parts, ships from Dutch East Indies and spices, sweat of workers, fishes, probably some bicycles and living drainage and so on and so on… even now, something new have been decomposed at any moment and combined with a new situation this in turn ultimately become a part of under the harbor.
In this way, we could say that under the harbor archives everything from ancient times to today.
It brings about a certain scent which could be also mixed with our imaginations and memories as parts of the history. The scent could tell us something very different from what we could see, observe through microscopes. This scent of ‘mixture of throughout the history in Oosterdok’ is changing everyday depends on the season, weather, time, as well as the audiences, when they are close to the water, some parts of their decomposed body will flake into the water, so that we’ll be a part of the history in the future.
Video documentation by Marjolijn Boterenbrood
Ongoing project with Mediamatic, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Supported by the Mondriaan Fund
All content © Mariko Hori 2021