Gorizia / Nova Gorica (Italy/Slovenia)
Project orientated Research
Realization 2000/2001
"Celebration Rocket" - Spremembazione IV

Celebration Rocket is the fourth in a series of urban interventions initiated by transbanana since 1997 in the divided city of Gorizia / Nova Gorica. These interventions are set, with respect to architecture and urbanism, in the sphere of experimental research and attempt to expand the definition of "urban planning" by including the conflicting parallel existence of everyday life.

The urban intervention Celebration Rocket (2000/2001) responds to the previous interventions 100 x 100 (2000), Super 8 (1998) and Spremembazione (1997), as well as to the city's current divided condition. The intervention attempted to sew together the two different political, historical and cultural parts.

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.