it’s dry under water

Type | light installation, sculpture

Year | 2023

Project site | Amsterdam (NL)

Concept Design proposal - shortlisted Amsterdam Light Festival 2024

The image of Amsterdam is unstable. From the first dam on the Amstel to the Oranjesluizen, this city has constantly changed its shape by weaving complex infrastructure into its landscape. Water is held back, leaving dry space below for the city to push upwards — an ever-changing masterplan. 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 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, the project 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 air volume, a sculptural piping assemblage, 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 of a lighthouse, a tower, a candle. At night, a glow emerges from within the canal, intriguing passersbys. This light follows the piping structure, shining intensely toward the sky. The tank glows like a beacon against the dark. In the day, the object works sculpturally, offering a similar intrigue through the textures of the repurposed pipes encased within a column-like structure and the floating transparent water tank.