Art Exhibition: Floodlight

In 2023, Amsterdam narrowly escaped a flood: a malfunction at the IJmuiden sluices meant the water couldn't be pumped out. For a moment, the future arrived early.

Floodlight takes you into that future. You see weathered canvases — fabrics that have themselves passed through water, dipped in tidal clay, threaded with metal wire that rusted in brackish tides, left at the flood line where seaweed, fishing line and plastic gather and dry. Onto these surfaces, altered underwater footage is projected: images from the Amsterdam canals, the Oosterdok and the wider Dutch coast, animated into the sensation of looking up from the seabed as light filters down. The city carries on, changed and slowly overgrown.

A spatial composition made from hydrophone recordings surrounds the space: rain on the surface, frogs in the Oostenburgervaart, the muffled rumble of trains and ships, seaweed crackling at low tide, a fog buoy, a shipping forecast drifting in from a distant radio station.

The traces of water are already in the canvases. The projected images don't erase them but grow out of them — an imagined ecology layered onto material shaped by time and tide.

Floodlight was developed and first presented at Mediamatic.

By Marjolijn Boterenbrood & Mark IJzerman.

A continuous installation can be found downstairs at the entrance to Tolhuistuin.

Marjolijn Boterenbrood & Mark IJzerman

Marjolijn Boterenbrood is a visual artist who explores place and space: she reveals what happens beneath the surface of a landscape. Mark IJzerman is an interdisciplinary artist and composer who, through installations and audiovisual performances, gives voice to the non-human world.

What connects them is water: the life it sustains, its effect on materials, and how it will transform our city. Floodlight was created during Marjolijn’s residency at Mediamatic, on the Oosterdok waterfront.