We are staging the show beneath the drinking-water reservoir that once supplied an entire village; over a hundred years ago, it collected the ‘wholesome waters from the ancient riverbed of the Idice’ to distribute them to every home in the village. A plaque commemorates this, thanking the owners of the springs. As I look at the splendid concrete structure that everyone calls ‘the water tower’, I wonder how anyone can own a spring; it would seem to be precisely one of those features of the past that now strike us as unrealistic, yet it is still a reality of the present day. Not here, where efforts are now being made to turn this place into a hub of artistic and cultural enrichment, but elsewhere, where millions of plastic bottles are used to turn the most essential of natural elements into private property and then a commodity. How do we reclaim the right to quench our thirst?