Water Towers as Kin

Artefacts as Encounters

This exhibition emerges from a series of encounters — fleeting, intimate, public, and quiet — with the water towers that punctuate the skylines of Darwin and Palmerston. These towers, often overlooked or instrumentalised, become here relational sites: places of memory, heat, resilience, and unexpected kinship.

The artefacts gathered — images, videos, marketing fragments, and shared stories — are not static representations. They are traces of meetings: between body and structure, light and concrete, stranger and neighbour. Each one holds the residue of a moment where attention was paid, where the towers were seen, felt, questioned, or reimagined.

Artefacts in Flux

These materials are not complete or closed. They shift meaning depending on who encounters them, when, and in what context, and under what weather or mood. A flyer becomes a memory prompt. A video becomes a rhythm. A photograph becomes a conversation. These artefacts remain in flux — open to reinterpretation, refusal, or resonance — much like the towers themselves, which weather storms, collect time, and bear witness to change.

Their presentation here honours that instability. Rather than a fixed archive, this is a holding space: a space to dwell, to return, to see again with new eyes.

An Arendtian Ethos

This work is grounded in an Arendtian ethos — one that values plurality, publicness, and the everyday rhythms of life. To engage with the towers as kin is to resist their abstraction or commodification. It is to honour them not only as infrastructure, but as participants in a shared world — standing among us, shaping the contours of our days.

Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s commitment to dialogue, accountability, and the sustenance of public space, this exhibition resists closure. It leans into complexity, contradiction, and care. It invites you to consider how kinship might be extended not just between people, but with the structures, stories, and places that sustain us — especially those that seem most silent or unseen.

Curatorial Note: Holding the Tower Lightly

This exhibition is not arranged by chronology or theme, but by resonance. You’ll find artefacts in proximity, not in order — forming constellations of mood, memory, and perspective. Marketing materials and public photographs sit beside quiet domestic reflections. Tower images captured in haste rest next to composed video portraits. Each is offered not as proof, but as part of an unfolding conversation.

We invite you to move slowly, to return, to listen across difference. Let the artefacts meet you where you are — and shift shape as they go.