In Genova there is two different gods to worship.

Maybe Renzo simply didn’t go all the way. Aesthetically, there is more meaningful things to
exploit of late capitalism than gazing at imprisoned dolphins in a cage just meters away from
their habitat while having a cheerful spongebob-themed pajama party.

As Sidsel Hansen puts it, you own what you clean.

- Genova is a city of harsh boundaries

- a rich collection of highly functioning, often perfectly hermetic membranes
- we observed this when we were visiting the city and tried to find a way into the
protected and heavily policed harbor area
- we observed a binary in the cultures and languages of the city, a surprisingly perfect
binary condition, churches exclusively on the one, silos exclusively on the other site
- we observed it in the multiple century old practice to shut off the bay (and therefore
the logistics of the port) from the violent forces of the sea, starting from the molo
vecchio, the most important Genovan engineering efforts are the ever-growing breakwaters
and jettys, aiming at the highest possible separation of the inside and the outside waters
- we observed this when we went to the beach (far out east at the very fringe of the city)
and the rumor spread it’s really not recommended to go take a swim, the water polluted
by the operation of one of the busiest harbors of the Mediterranean Sea, suddenly the
beach and the piers become a chain of frightening walls
- also in what is left of a publicly accessible waterfront in the city, the craft of
maintaining impenetrable borders
is practised
- aquariums with captivated dolphins, just meters away from their natural habitat
- the biosfera, holding a artificial climate in its glass belly, a downright
celebration of keeping things apart from eachother
-…
- additionally, the refurbished waterfront is dividing the ones who want and are able to
afford the tickets of all these privatized, consumerist entertainment places from the ones not
willing or able to subordinate to these rules, it is not a public space as itself
- this lead us to our fantasy of an implosion in genova, to implode the separated into each
other
- the implosion as an event takes pressure differences, whose creation and maintenance
essentially are the most exquisite quality of borders, and turns them against the
separation itself, forcing the separated to have heavy duty contact and confront themselves
- subsequently we took on a place that seems to hint at an event of this kind, genova
itself seems to be preparing for an implosion
- the tip of molo vecchio itself brings us back to the origin of the Genova artistry of the
separation, the first breakwater ever!
- we unfold our fantasy of the implosion upon one of the, in our eyes, most tragic separations
in the collection of genova:
the very impossibility in genova to become physical with the water, the body of water
and the bodies of the Genovans are deeply estranged neighbours
- so we clean the water, make air and give a new ground for a rendezvous, hundreds and
thousands of rendezvous between the bodies of genova and the Genovan water
- a new ground in an infrastructure that ideally enables another, more public being at the
water that what he have seen before
- learning from the total dedication to totality and infrastructural megalomania of the harbor,
the (in the best sense) indifference to social normativity
- learning from the carefully, as it seems never without love, constructed borders of renzo, the
aquaria, the biospheres, in the hope to find a loophole connection to a lost relationship, to
make in that sense a second degree separation
- the waters cleaned are
1) the water in the port, exposed to multiple sources and types of contamination
- we turn the sea into an inside-out infinity pool, the water constantly pouring into
the cavity between the two retainment walls, hitting the filter system
2) the ballast water of the arriving cruise ships, often carrying organisms that pose a
delicate threat to the integrity and balance of the local ecosystem
- Italy is one of the only European countries to not partake in a international
regulative initiative to control the containments of ballast water, so this is a vital
piece of equipment to introduce to the genova port habitat
- the ballast water is taken in via pipes while the entering cruise ships berth for a
brief period of time at the additional dock of the structure
- the substantial part of the contaminants are filtered out by a passive filtering system that
runs on sand and gravel of various sizes and works on the gravitational pressure of the water
alone, the very same system is used to treat drinking water in Zürich
- after its treatment the water enters the basin below water level, leading to a ring of
miraculously whirling water along the interior walls
- while in the basin for approx. 4 hours it washes around the partly uncovered seabed,
resulting in a new landscape for the Genovans and their water to start a bodily relationship

Missing:
Water being fed into the bay, diluting its constant contamination to a degree that is harmless
to the ecosystem and enables