PH

PROJECT

As industrialization accelerates, and with it the consumption of natural resources, demands for economic growth and development are often pitted against the need to conserve our fragile natural environment. The opposition between growth and finitude has inspired efforts to limit human activity in hopes of restoring a self-regulating natural balance. But rather than assume that there is a nature to return to by attempting to go “back to nature,” we can instead use technology to increase, amplify, and enhance the action of natural systems and thereby at least partially compensate for human activity. To live in the modern world is, in fact, to live within an ever-thickening web of interconnected natural and technological systems. Therefore, being “at home in the modern world”— a theme of the Biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky — means being comfortable in this state of entanglement and being able to deftly navigate its circuits.

pH Project translates this global condition to the local level. Venice is a city out of balance: a sinking metropolis caught in the battle between nature and culture. It is powered by a single industry, tourism, that produces nothing but consumes everything: most of all, it consumes the city itself. When Thomas Mann wrote his novella Death in Venice (1912)—a reflection on the destructive power of beauty and obsession — cities had already long been associated with pestilence, contagion, and filth. This was, of course, the dark side of their cosmopolitan diversity, social complexity, and the cultural freedom and economic mobility they offered. Mann evoked Venice’s dual nature — its decadence and decay — in his depiction of a deadly cholera epidemic. Located on the Adriatic Sea near the base of the pristine Alps, and hovering precariously above a miasmatic salt marsh, with its murky black circulatory system exposed to the world, Venice is the consummate city: filthy and beautiful.

In opposition to the modernist approach — which, under the banner of “light and air,” would wipe the city clean and whitewash it with a double layer of repression and effacement (first of the dirt itself and then of the mechanisms to deal with it) — pH Project exposes, or makes visible, the purification of water, a natural commodity that is both essential to life and a civic symbol. The project reconciles extremes: the stench of sewage lying beneath the photogenic surface of Venice and the irreducible Italian pleasure — the comforting aroma and bracing flavor of espresso.

The installation, located midway along the Corderie, a 317-meter-long venue within the Arsenale di Venezia, is equal parts labo­ratory and café. It houses a hybrid natural-artificial water purification system that speeds up the cleansing effects of tidal wetlands and converts the city’s notoriously filthy canal water into espresso. A transparent glass pipe passes through a window in the Corderie to draw water from the adjacent canal and channel it through the purification system. First, the water is filtered, removing its sludge, sewage, and toxins. Then the water enters a glass holding tank that is divided into a series of compartments, each containing a progressively finer filter, removing solids, microorganisms, and dissolved inorganic and organic substances in the process. The graduated compartments deliver increasingly clean water.

When the water is clean enough to meet municipal standards for drinking, it slowly falls in droplets, like an IV drip, and is collected in a vat, where it is heated. The water is converted into steam and forced through coffee grounds to become the quintessential Italian pick-me-up. The purification apparatus reaches its terminus at an espresso bar — a focal point for social activity and scientific curiosity. Baristas serve the public, regularly checking water quality at the testing station. Visitors are able to drink Venice.

An engineering phase conducted in collaboration with a local water treatment facility was completed, but the project was unable to be realized for the 2008 Biennale.