Tensione superficiale [Surface Tension] is a site-specific installation by artist Eugenio Tibaldi, created for the city of Ancona after a long process of exploration and listening to the territory between 2023 and 2025, through multiple stays in the city and encounters with its people and landscapes. Inspired by water striders—those insects able to glide on water—and shaped as a hybrid being born from the remains of vegetation, the sea, and the city, the work speaks of journeys and migrations; of movement.
The project takes its cue from the surface tension of water, the force that allows water striders to move lightly across the boundary between air and liquid. In the same way, the two structures of the installation—TS_01 (a sailboat) and TS_02 (a canoe)—stand suspended on thin metal legs, hybrid creatures balancing between sea and land, city and nature.
This image reflects a vision of Ancona as an amphibious city, poised between hills and coastline, between its role as a port and that of a place of passage. A city that resists a single identity, shaped over centuries by migrations, contaminations, and both urban and social fragmentation.
Inside the two vessels grow soil and plants, as if they were carrying a small fertile baggage—ready both to take root and to depart. Each TS is a “suspended garden” that transforms leftovers into resources: abandoned boats become habitats, scaffolding pipes turn into animal-like legs, fragments of the city intertwine with the vegetation of the Cardeto Park, a wild and spontaneous landscape that escapes the tidy logic of urban green spaces.
The TS are not static sculptures but transitional organisms that shift with the seasons, integrate with the biodiversity of the Cardeto, and face the sea and the city as horizons under tension. They are liminal figures, born at the margins, embodying a reflection on precariousness as a generative condition: every state is temporary, every leftover can become a new form of life, every passage can open up possibilities.
Thus, Ancona is revealed as a city in motion—made of transits and layers, of arrivals and departures, of plural identities coexisting without ever settling into a definitive form.
The project for Ancona
Tensione Superficiale [Surface Tension] is part of the broader cultural-based urban regeneration process that Sineglossa promotes in Ancona, the city where it is based. From the project of a newspaper that collected citizens’ dreams and transformed them through artificial intelligence into visions of the future (IAQOS, 2019), to collaborations with associations, organizations, and collectives seeking to reshape the narrative the city tells about itself. For many who live, work, or pass through it, Ancona feels like a centrifugal city; the goal of this process is to build new stories that attract rather than repel. In 2024, this journey further materialized with the creation of a non-tourist guide to Ancona, written by its inhabitants and aimed at travelers who want to grasp the true spirit of the place.
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Eugenio Tibaldi
Eugenio Tibaldi (Alba, 1977) has long been dedicated to exploring contemporary landscapes and the aesthetics of the margins. Through predominantly site-specific works, he offers alternative images of places, giving form to their dynamics and relationships. He has worked in Istanbul, Cairo, Rome, Thessaloniki, Berlin, Verona, Havana, Bucharest, Turin, Caracas, Brussels, Tirana, Addis Ababa, Mumbai, Malta, Santiago de Chile, and has exhibited in numerous international public and private institutions. Since 2001 he has been working continuously with the Umberto Marino gallery in Naples.
Credits
Surface Tension is an installation by Eugenio Tibaldi, curated by Alessandra Pioselli, promoted and produced by Sineglossa as part of Sistema, a project coordinated by the Municipality of Ancona and supported by Fondazione Cariverona. The work was created with the technical support of CapStudio, the botanical contribution of Vivai Lauri and the Botanical Garden of Ancona, and the support of Nautica Montecristo for materials and transport.
