When curator Lýdia Pribišová approached us with Aqua Vitae for Trenčín, we began thinking about the history of this place, about medieval alchemy, and about the many meanings water has carried through time.
This led us to the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious medieval book written in a language that no one has been able to decipher. Its pages are populated by strange plants, bathing bodies, vessels, tubes and pipes carrying water. Everything seems connected. The images hover somewhere between plumbing and cosmology, energy and healing, infrastructure and alchemy.
This became a starting point for Disaster Fountain.
We began wondering what these old images might mean in a new place, under contemporary conditions of climate emergency.
For us, water has many careers. It can heal. It can circulate. It can cool. It can become infrastructure. And in the event of fire or extreme heat, it becomes a medium of protection and care.
We began working with the infrastructure of firefighting: recycled fire hoses, hydrants, couplings and other elements associated with emergency response. The sculptures are assembled through bricolage. They are partly firefighting equipment and partly strange, speculative forms emerging from our reading of the manuscript.
But Disaster Fountain is also operative. It depends on connections. The hydrants depend on the hoses. The hoses depend on water. And the entire work depends on our relationships with volunteer firefighters, the producers and collaborators of Cultural Capital, the citizens of Trenčín, and all those involved in making the work possible.
Perhaps the fountain is not really an object, but a system, a network of relations between water, bodies, infrastructure, care and emergency. And its meaning, like water itself, only emerges through circulation.
Concept and Realization: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas
Design Collaboration: Dimitrios Moutafidis
Collaborating Firefighters: Volunteer Firefighters of Opatovce
Fabrication: Simonas Šidlauskas, Artūras Burneika
Studio Assistance: Eliot Felde
Curator: Lýdia Pribišová
Project Manager: Veronika Juricová
Producer: Trenčín 2026 – European Capital of Culture
Photo: Martina Mlcuchova, drone image: Branislav “Braňo” Hollý © the authors
