ACQUA ALTA 4

2010

NORLA DOME
MISSION TO SEAFARERS
MELBOURNE

Single channel video with sound, found furniture, handcrafted sculptural elements, 14 resin mooring rings, 750 metres of rope, 400 litres recycled ship engine oil, drawings.


DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

The Acqua Alta Project comprised four site-specific installations incorporating variously photographs, drawings, video elements and reimagined found objects. Common to each installation was a series of handcrafted sculptural elements that functioned as anchor points for a spatial drawing composed with hundreds of metres of rope. The first iteration of the project was Hazewinkel’s contribution to the group exhibition Overlap 3 (2006) presented at the British School at Rome following his Australia Council for the Arts studio residency in Rome. It was further developed into the Acqua Alta Project over the following years.

Installed at the Mission to Seafarer’s Norla Dome (conceived by architect Walter Butler in 1920 as a reduced scale interpretation of the interior of the Pantheon in Rome), Acqua Alta 4 linked back to project’s place of origin. The installation described and occupied a vertical axis established between the dome’s oculus and a correspondingly dimensioned shallow pool containing 400 litres of recycled ship engine oil. Floating partially submerged in this optically accurate liquid mirror was another (convex) mirror. Both reflected a spatial drawing suspended from 14 transparent mooring rings fixed into the dome above. Looking into the pool, visitors looked beyond the rope entanglement above, and the sculptural elements suspended in it, through the oculus, to the sky. Installed within the dome's antechamber was Weightlessness, an 18 minute single channel video accompanied by an original composition scored by J.David Franzke that engaged with the acoustic potentials of the dome. A small suite of watercolour and gouache drawings made by Hazewinkel in 2006 were also presented. Acqua Alta 4 culminated the project.


watch Weightlessness here


The Acqua Alta Project is documented in an accompanying publication, which includes images of all project iterations and texts by Geraldine Barlow, Rebecca Coates, Anthony Gardner and Stefania Manna. The individual essays are available at the Texts page of this website.


read Geraldine Barlow's essay Like the Thread of a River here

read Rebecca Coates' essay The Antique and the Everyday here

read Anthony Gardner's essay Lucciole here

read Stefania Manna's essay FCO-MEL Unspooling here