Hidden Harbour

Hidden Harbour is a monumental artwork created by Hans Wilschut in 2011 for the elevator waiting areas of the World Port Center in Rotterdam, commissioned by the Port of Rotterdam Authority. Wilschut worked on the project for more than a year, turning his camera towards parts of the Port of Rotterdam that usually remain out of view: work sites, quays, installations and infrastructures on which the city depends, but to which visitors rarely have access.

Spread across the floors, eighteen large lightboxes form a photographic route through the port. The images present the harbour as a layered world of infrastructure, labour, scale and movement.

For this work, Wilschut took the painterly concept of repoussoir as his point of departure. By placing foreground elements prominently within the image, the viewer’s gaze is drawn into depth. In this way, the photographs not only relate to the harbour outside the building, but also to the space in which they are viewed. The elevator waiting areas become part of the work: places of brief pause, where looking, waiting and moving coincide.

Through their placement near the elevators, the work takes on an almost cinematic rhythm. Each floor opens up a new fragment of the same hidden harbour. The everyday act of waiting is connected to a slowly unfolding image of Rotterdam as a working, changing and constantly shifting port city.

The project led to the book Hidden Harbour, an autonomous publication containing 40 photographs.