leaving the harbor of haloes (double projection) duration: 5.5 min

animation and sound: Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

Remains of French Gothic architectural masterpieces stand in ruins inside the walled city of Famagusta in Cyprus – contemporary evidence of the Ottoman siege of 1571. In this landscape of collapsed arches and buttresses, sailors seem to have come ashore in the 16th – 19th centuries and spent their time by carving images of their ships into the exposed frescoes of a church called St. George of the Greeks. They carved between haloes and over saints, leaving no trace of a personal name or purpose. Judging by the detail on most of the ships, many of these were Ottoman sailors who were quite interested in rigging.

In the spring of 2010 I collected this sailors’ graffiti by making rubbings, and converted them into an animation that, when projected on a wall, connects the ships with their origins as graffiti.  The ships also seem to sail in a space – a third dimension created in the animation – and an escape from the original flatness of the iconographic world on the church walls.

Each ship moves according to the way it was found: how the sails are filled, and the direction of the hull. No changes were made to the sailors’ drawings. Among other sounds, the acoustic component of the work includes glass pipes and birds in flight.

EHD April 2011