Site Lab Project

In 2020 I was invited to participate in LAB – a virtual online artist residency with four other artists • Karin van der Molen • Lily Balasanova • Agnes Deli • Elena Redaelli - from the Netherlands, Russia, Hungary and Italy. The idea of an online residency took shape as an alternative to traveling all over the world, as all of us had done before, to make work on site. The challenge for this residency was to make site specific work for a place where we could not be physically present.

The site chosen for the project is Waterloopbos, an abandoned and overgrown water research laboratory in The Netherlands. Here, over a period of fifty years, hydraulic models – sluices, dams, and wave machines – were built to enable the study of water currents for the development of large ports such as Rotterdam, Lagos, IJmuiden, Istanbul and Bangkok. The site resonated strongly for me with a project that I completed in 2019, where I investigated the changed ecology of local waterways after the construction of Manly Dam in Sydney.

Via the internet I received a link to two hundred photographs of the hydraulic models at Waterloopbos. Through a process of tracing those images onto sheets of drafting film, I built up the layers and layers of linear marks in blues and greens that form the finished drawing.

Finished, but hopefully not final. Diagrammatic in form, the drawing could be a preparatory work for a future physical intervention onto the site.

See the online catalogue : https://issuu.com/redaellielena/docs/art_catalogue_site_lab