Aqueduct

Temporary projection onto the underbelly of the Westway

Aqueduct was commissioned by the Portobello Film Festival in 2001. The film’s footage of a fast-moving body of water was projected as a series of images ‘caught’ by a spotlight running across the underbelly of London’s Westway over two evenings. Panning over waves and the occasional toy boat, the camera’s attempts to rationalise scale were problematicised by the projection of an almost miniature seascape (the video was shot in the Regent’s Canal) onto the inhuman scale of one of the city’s major elevated motorways.

The construction of the Westway in the 80s created a zone of dereliction for West London. Homes and businesses were cleared to make way for a street level bereft of activity, save for a handful of improvised skate parks. Cotterrell’s disorienting, nocturnal daydream worked with the architecture, hinting at the relationships between environments and populations. The subversion of the thundering motorway as a screen precedes Cotterrell’s later experiment with derelict sites, Searchlight.

Materials:

Data Projector, Scan Commander Lighting Controller and Vari-Lite Mirror

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