CAROLINE BRÜNEN

1     The city's (waste) water system is like the human digestive apparatus. What comes in gets digested - water gets polluted and cleaned - and comes out again in the end. However, the water is not entirely clean at this point. Pharmaceutical residues are not filtered out of the water in Cologne, but flow back into the Rhine. That's why you can still drink directly from the river in Basel, but 500km downstream you no longer should. On the way, it passes simply too much human. 

2    Everywhere under the city are tunnels. Smaller and larger pipes through which flows what we flush down the toilet. And what slips through the drains - leaves, plastic, tights. This pipe system in Cologne is 2400 kilometers long. That's the equivalent of the car route from Cologne to Istanbul. 20 percent of these pipes are large enough for people to walk in. And that's what they do, to repair leaks and to clean up your shit, and mine, and theirs, in case something doesn't slip through.

3     Denise and I walk across the sewage treatment plant, it's incredibly hot. I'm not allowed to leave the paths. I'm not wearing safety shoes.“It could stink a bit back there, in this heat it can be really bad sometimes.””How do people react when you tell them what you do for a living?”The question comes out of nowhere. Still, she doesn't have to think too long.“Most people don’t understand what I do. My friends call me Shit Shoveler... it's meant to be funny.”Denise is a trained wastewater technician. She chose this profession because she is interested in chemistry and biology. And the job is safe, too. She is one of three women in the team of over 50 technicians at Cologne's largest sewage treatment plant.

4    Water, clean drinking water from the sink, shower, toilet, was as natural to me as breathing. It wasn't until I was 20 that I learned that it was a blatant privilege. I learned it when I was in Mexico for the first time and woke with a hangover. Classy! I had forgotten to buy water. Hungover, with a headache and super thirsty, I walked ten minutes to the nearest store instead of the tap. I learned only much later that it is also a blatant privilege to be able to simply buy bottled water. But I remember well how I thought at the time that it was completely crazy never to have thought about it. In my diary as a 20-year-old I wrote, "Real luxury is being able to drink tap water." Today, I'd say: "Privileges are invisible to those who have them.“ 

5      I am trying hard to write straight here, parallel to the floor. Western culture loves the straight line. We build houses high in the sky and squeeze rivers into canals. When I was 22, I had a phrase tattooed around my ankle. "All life is in circles" it says. I never meant something like karma, but circles, cycles. I was sometimes embarrassed by the tattoo. It sounds a bit eso, but it is physics. I have no idea of physics, I know only so much: All sorts of things circle around each other. Neutrons, protons, electrons are circling to form atoms, atoms circling around each other are forming molecules. The moon orbits around the earth, the earth around the sun. You know it. Water also circles, it forms drops for example - circles in 3D. If you let rivers be, they meander. The formula is: circles + downhill. 

6      Since I've been working with water and wastewater, I've been thinking a lot about connectedness. And realize that I'm not connected to my own digestion at all. As long as there are no problems there, I don't want to have anything to do with my shit. The city is an organism, it too digests. Namely, what has already passed through its inhabitants. Isn't it somehow a bit heart-warming that all our shit flows together and then runs along together under the city? In a funny way, this makes us extremely close to each other. If we weren't so distant from our excrements and thus from our bodies and our nature, then that would be direct connectedness.

7     Everything that flows through us - beer, cake, antibiotics - is washed away by water. After it flows under the city, it is cleaned and returned to the water cycle. A little dirtier than before, though. It seems to be gone, but it comes back to us, this water. Not exactly the same molecules, perhaps, but in our cities there is water flowing – invisibly to the most of us – that is part of the global cycle. After all, all water is one. And it's been the same for millions of years. I learned that in 5th grade geography class: evaporation, clouds, rain, rivers, the ocean - it's all connected. And it flows in circles. Even the most seemingly static puddle is part of it, it evaporates or is washed away by the rain. All water is one, we ourselves consist for the most part of water. This too is connectedness. Water is life and all life is in circles. I learned it before and then forgot.