Camilla Hoffmeister

waterways is an installation that explores the fluid and boundless territory of water, using aluminium sand casting to capture its ephemeral state.
All water is connected. Rivers, streams, lakes and oceans, as well as groundwater and source water, wetlands and estuaries. They form a network of waterways that is always changing, always in movement. 

The installation waterways revolves around the waters journey along this fluid territory that crosses borders and connects all places on Earth with each other - uniting them or dividing them. It is a symbolic river that is not linked to a specific location, but that is open for personal interpretation. Everyone has their own connection to water, and this installation evokes a journey back to those waters, linking the installation to individual memories or imaginations.


In order to map the flow of water, the technique of sand casting was used to capture a state of fluidity. Throughout the process, water was poured into a sand box, letting it seep into the ground and leaving a trace of water that then was cast and copied by pouring molten aluminium into the mould. Aluminium, being liquid when molten and solid when cooled, solidifies the flow of water and creates unpredictable shapes that constitute the installation. This allows to create a map of an ephemeral state of fluidity in a solid shape in which the viewer can immerse into this shifting territory.

The aluminium cast waterway is complemented by an atlas that can offer the viewer a parallel journey through different landscapes and waterscapes. It revolves around the places that are far and the places that lie close. Around the places that are connected and the places that could be. It is an invitation to enter an imaginary journey that connects the passing landscapes with the waterway.

By documenting, capturing and representing a fluid landscape, waterways questions the viewer on how territories are defined by borders and how nevertheless we are all interconnected by water. The installation gives shape to the shifting, ephemeral and indefinite landscapes that can adapt to the current circumstances of the environment and external factors like the capitalisation and control of water or the disappearance of water. Being a territory that connects and unites all places, it allows a slight change in one region to trigger extensive global effects, both negative and positive.