Celebration Rocket - Spremembazione IV

Celebration Rocket, the most recent realized project, thematized the city's 1000 th Anniversary. We decided to put on a fireworks display whose space and stars would result directly from the divided city's psychogeography. Therefore, transbanana invented trans-sport-banana.

As in the project Super 8, we found it necessary to treat the traumatized space of Gorizia/Nova Gorica with energy, which would have an immediate effect - on psychostructural mending. While in Super 8 a film was the centerpiece, here a fireworks display as the totality of the work process, including its SPECIFIC CONSTRUCTION and presence in real and virtual space, formed the intervention.

Regrettably, not a single institution - neither cultural, nor political - was willing to co-host the "Villa" Jubilee (Gorizia was first documented in 1001 as "villa", Slavic for a village without fortification). Instead, each side celebrated on its own. We, the architects - as transsportbanana's pyrotechnicians - prepared an additional firworks which would accompany the conventional New Year's fireworks on the two sides at this unique moment.

A significant and sensitive point in the city was selected as launching pad: the Piazza Transalpina, where the border has divided the city since 1947. At the square in front of the train station the European Union border was manifest - almost cynically - by a two-meter high metal fence, transposing Slovenia and Italy into incidental neighbors, and intensifying the persistent fears and resultant limitations.