The installation Sacred Hydraulics – Communicating Vessels by Rinos Stefani, in the exhibition Aqua Memoria, draws inspiration from the hydraulic complex on the Fabrika site, Paphos, Cyprus, where recent excavations have revealed the fundamental role these installations played in the site’s urban and cultural history. Designed in the Hellenistic period and perfected under the Roman Empire, this complex network of cisterns, canals, wells and basins testifies to the technical mastery of ancient civilizations in water management. It is much more than a simple water system: it reflects technical know-how, an organized urban lifestyle, environmental adaptation, and historical continuity—standing as a key testimony to the sophistication of ancient Cypriot societies.
The artwork, deliberately placed at the heart of the remnants of the Roman hydraulic system, invites us to reconsider its installations through the lens of contemporary reflection. Crossing perpendicularly the path of the channels carved by ancient engineers, the two barrels are connected by a discreet tube through which water flows. In this way, the piece reintroduces tension into the space.
By using blue agricultural barrels, Rinos Stefani substitutes Roman technical ceramics with everyday objects, while preserving the meaning of a shared vital flow. Drawing on the principle of communicating vessels, the artist employs water as a mediator of balance, memory, and dialogue. It is a metaphor evoking human societies, which cannot survive without communication, cooperation and exchange.
The work extends the artist’s practice, which since the 1980s has used humble materials and symbolic gestures in performances to question collective memory.
Sacred Hydraulics echoes his Charcoal Project (2011), created in the Pyrgos – Limnitis Tylliria buffer zone, Cyprus, where charcoal production is a long tradition – and charcoal—a burnt material—evoked the scars of a divided land. Here, water replaces ash, but the logic remains: to set in motion what has become frozen. From a borderland to an archaeological site, between these two works over a decade apart, a poetic reversal takes place: from darkness to transparency, from boundary to porosity, from fracture to flow. What persists is the need to conceive the island as a network of interrupted circulations that must once again be reconnected.
In both cases, Rinos Stefani’s art is an art of silent repair—a work that insists we reflect on the balance needed between the physical or political forces at play if any practice is to be sustained. Sacred Hydraulics thus becomes a metaphor for vital communication, rooted in a global artistic practice oriented toward slow, poetic resistance grounded in the union of visual art, political consciousness, and poetic activism.
Catherine Louis Nikita, curator