Fishing Zone
2022
installation, performance, sculpture
magnet-fished artefacts, concrete
Pavilijoen aan het Water, Rotterdam (NL)
The city holds more than it admits. Beneath the surface of Rotterdam's waterways — the Maas, the harbour basins, the canals of South Rotterdam — lies a sediment of discarded history: objects made to disappear, now buried in silt, slowly becoming something else.
Fishing Zone began with magnet-fishing: casting strong magnets into urban water and pulling out whatever the city had forgotten. A cash register. A shoemaker's anvil. A Swapfiets bicycle. A Webley air pistol. Each object retrieved, cleaned, and placed in relation to the others — a horizontal archive of things that were once functional, then unwanted, then submerged. Displayed together, they rewrite their own story: not waste, but evidence. Layers of a city's life made suddenly visible.
The found objects became instruments. In a live performance at Pavilijoen aan het Water, Finding the Wild invited musicians and visitors to play them — striking, scraping, and sounding the artefacts as the rust fell away, revealing the true surfaces beneath. The resulting audiovisual work Splash Metronome (3'28) distils this encounter into a looped film: the percussion of retrieved metal, water, and attention.
Running parallel, Maas Stones extended the inquiry from water to land. Along the Maas waterfront, twelve concrete formations — cast from foraged and reclaimed scrapwood assembled and reassembled into endlessly varied configurations — were placed across the landscape. Each casting was different; the same pieces of found wood produced a different stone each time, manufacturing the randomness that nature usually generates alone. The stones created new duck habitats and informal seating toward the Rotterdam skyline. They remain there and can be visited to this day.
Fishing Zone, 2022, findings archive
Fishing Zone, magnet-fished artefacts, installation view, 2022
Photo: Theo Huijgens