Everything Under, Mark Požlep, 2025
Film Essay, 20’51”, 2025
“Everything Under” is a meditative cinematic journey through the urban waterways of Ghent. Filmed entirely at water level, this work drifts through spaces both visible and concealed, reflecting on memory, displacement, and transformation. Water becomes both witness and storyteller—timeless, fluid, and ever-present.
Artist Mark Požlep has spent a year navigating Ghent’s network of canals, rivers, and docks aboard a self-built aluminum research boat. Light and agile, the vessel allowed access to hidden places otherwise unreachable—spaces where the past lingers just beneath the surface. The journey began with an intention to document and uncover forgotten stories and landscapes. But the exploration took another turn.
What emerged instead was an introspective process—an encounter not with untouched wildness, but with a city’s controlled, commercialized, and reshaped waterscape. The once-tidal Scheldt and Leie rivers have been stilled by locks, their natural rhythms subdued. Much of what was “wild” has disappeared, replaced by infrastructure and surveillance, by order and use.
And yet, the water endures.
Through image and sound, Everything Under invites viewers to sense the undercurrents of time, history, and human presence within the city’s aquatic arteries. These waterways—though shaped, restrained, and managed—continue to carry memory. They reflect the tension between permanence and change, presence and absence.
The work is not only about the city, but about the act of listening: listening to water, to place, and to what lies beneath. Everything Under is an invitation to float, to drift, and to dwell—for a moment—within a city’s quiet, flowing heart.
Produced by Kunsthal Gent, Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER, de Koer
Project was subsidised by Vlaamse Gemeenschap
Everything under, 2025
Project by Mark Požlep
Camera: Kobe Wens, Mark Požlep
Editing: Kobe Wens
Sound: Iris Van Geen, Kobe Wens
Music: Iris Van Geen
Dramaturgy: Nele Buyst
Production: Griet Dobbelare & Abel Provoost
Boat building: Boat building: Werner Musenbrock – The Workshop
photo by Michiel Devijver 
