Nicosia Water Tanks is a project on the water infrastructure of divided Nicosia. It consists on the creation of a system of archives that "describe" the city's water networks. The water infrastructure of Nicosia is mainly constructed after the traumatic stabilization of the city in 1974. After 1974 the water supply in the south could not depend any more to the important water source of Morphou that was located in the north; two different water supply networks (overlapping in some parts) exist thus in Nicosia. Both networks encounter problems due to the quality of water and the difficulty of finding it and circulating it. The sewerage infrastructure was funded by the United Nations after 1974 and is the only shared infrastructure of the divided city.
The project assembles material (pictures and films) from existing archives of the water network services of the north and the south. Interviews from the directors of the departments, explaining the state of the networks, are added to this expanding pool of documents. Photos from the dry dams of Troodos Mountain, or pictures and drawings that describe details of the network’s equipment, photos from the first desalination unit, that is based on israeli technology, videos from the sewerage control robots that inspect the network but also photos of some swimming pools of Nicosia, a small collection of objects, prints and uniforms (used by the sewerage personnel to enter the main pipes) form a thematic assemblage of archives. The project does not only consist on the piling of the new documents in a formed platform but more on the possibilities of rearrangements of this idiosyncratic "documentation". The project is done with the collaboration of Armin Linke.