1996,09: Maik Mager Engels

Maik Mager: working with water
published in: Archis (1996) 9, pp 9-10 as translation of the orginal text in Dutch

Until 29 September 1996 Maik Mager's installation 'Waterwerk NAi' is to be seen (and heard) in Rotterdam: water, pumped up from the basin surrounding the Netherlands Architecture Institute building, falls down from the pergola in a 23 metre wide screen. For three minutes of every fifteen the terrace is shut in by a watery wall, or rather a curtain. Whispering one minute and roaring the next, this curtain provides a spectacle that is both visual and auditory.[...]

Since 1993 the Rotterdam sculptor Maik Mager (1948) has been using her ‘waterworks’ projects to explore new possibilities for water in public space. So as to get the broadest possible view of the subject she developed a number of themes which she then worked up into sculptures that visualize various conceptual models. One such theme, ‘wet and within’, inspired a series of moulded rubber trays, hanging on a wall, on the inside of which are worm-shaped inversions – the subject here being primarily an impression of wetness rather than actual moisture. The waterwork based on the theme 'enclose/surround' which Mager showed at the beginning of June in the nearby Museum Park, was a temporary work. Bucket-shaped lumps of ice hung from the branches of fully-grown plane trees at the foot of the dike (Westzeedijk); there they slowly melted away, revealing fish frozen into the ice which eventually fell onto the grass. I walked under a ceiling of frozen clouds from which dripped a slow-motion shower of rain, at the same time imagining myself to be on the other side of the dike, at the bottom of a sea full of icebergs.

Maik Mager. 'Wir sind schon lange da', Museumpark Rotterdam; 1996
© photo: Guus Vreeburg, Rotterdam

Waterwerk NAi, itself a temporary work, belongs to the series 'run/flow/fall'. This inspired a model for an 'avenue of drops' for a park-like setting: water would drip on to passers by from perforated tubes mounted on stylized tree-trunks cast in bronze, set up on either side of the path. Different again was the curtain of drops above the tunnel-like entrance to the ART Space Gallery in Winnipeg (Canada). Where the earlier project, with its exclusive focus on visualizing the water's infrastructure, resulted in a sculpture in the conventional sense, here the form was reduced to a barely visible tube on the front facade. Drops fell as a fine, linear shower, not continually but for three minutes in every quarter of an hour. To quote Mager: In this way the visitor experiences a ‘before’, a ‘during’ and an ‘after’.” Despite its minimally material and fragile character, Mager here reveals the architectural potential of water itself: it proved able
to articulate space and define boundaries.

Waterwerk NAi is a more monumental construction. Mager wanted it to define the terrace carved out of the entrance block as 'a gap in the architecture' by 'closing it up with water and sound', so temporarily changing an external space into an internal one. The membrane of water originally envisaged for the 23 metre wide opening transpired to be technically impossible: it would have meant pumping up still greater quantities of water, and consequently much greater weight, by much larger pumps than are now necessary. The work ultimately ended up as a curtain of 765 jets, each a centimetre thick to avoid the jets being blown away on their journey. This is another intermittent display - at high windspeeds an anemometer switches it off. Quoting Mager again: “turn off the tap and the sculpture is gone.”
Unlike the more poetic work in Winnipeg, the NAi curtain has a stupefying effect: the calm of the horizontal water surface of the pond is whipped away by the furious jets. Here the water has an exceedingly physical rather than a meditative effect: the force with which it is impelled is not only visible and audible but also immediately and physically tangible, particularly from the terrace. There the curtain surges away from you and towards you, a trellis wall forcing you to keep your distance: if you don't, you get soaked. The outside world remains visible but is completely shouted down. Seen from beyond, the physical threat is diminished; the impression is much more of a 'wall' in the physical sense, one that sparkles in the sun. The effect created when the wall 'stops' is spectacular from both vantage-points, the roar turning into a patter of drops and finally into silence. Mager conceives Waterwerk NAi not as a sculpture but as architecture. By allowing water to fall freely she succeeds in endowing it with an utterly independent architectonic form, even though the wall is only temporary and relative. Typologically the work suggests a marquee: the terrace as waterside refreshment tent rather than simple annexe.

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