Contemplative Shit
a soundwalk with water
I've been writing this week about springs and spas and sewerage, but with so much liquid content things were bound to spill over. So I've split it into two buckets. Here, a full moon serve of Contemplative Shit – a somatic poetry soundwalk I made with Tomas Björkdal. The next bucket will be delivered on the new moon - a big weave of In Finite Water: on springs, spas and sewerage.
Contemplative Shit is a piece from 2021, made as part of The Shit Project - a public art project in collaboration with environmental humanities researchers, based around waste water in Gnesta (where we lived before moving to the forest), in Sweden. While it does give me the luxury of two more weeks to let the sediment settle on In Finite Water, I do have to share this sound piece with you first as it holds something essential. Phosphorus perhaps? During this project I learnt a lot from sewerage, walked regularly by the sewerage works, beside the river it empties into. I became very aware of every flush and turn of the tap and began seeing the passage of the water in my mind's eye from our house in town, through pipes underground, joining with grey water and mingling with sewerage from all the other people from all the other houses, converging at the sewerage works. I could no longer see the brown of the river without thinking of my part in it.
I visited the sewerage works with co-artists, looked down into the tower of shit being aerated, learnt about the processes and chemicals added - some of which are extremely caustic prior to dilution. We even stuck a probe with a microphone into the shit heap - the last stop for solids before being spread of fields. At the time the municipality was being penalised by the county council for polluting Frösjö (Seed lake) and the Sigtuna river with a sewerage leak that went on for months. A lake that no one can safely swim in, despite the 'beach' the municipality constructed. Beautifuckation - I was attempting to write beautification but that is so much better, beautifuckation is exactly what it is.
All this to say, I think this project had a fair part in insighting our move off-grid to the forest. I knew too much to continue contributing to this dysfunctional and polluting system. Of course removing ourselves from the town does exactly nothing to help the situation. Though we did draw attention to the issues through art, in collaboration with researchers, and a hell of a lot of toilet humor. Our move was more about seeking an embodied experience in the forest and part of that is treating our pee and poo as compostable matter. Returning them to the earth without adding chemicals. A bunch of other wonderful artworks grew out of this process: Fekalie-safari by Rolf Schuurmans and Patrick Dallard, Phosphorus by
and David Carmel, Patrick’s Dass-wagon, Tomas Björkdal and my Shitopia and Banquet of Earth by Johanna Törnqvist and I, as pictured in the photo above. You can catch a glimpse of all of these in The Shit Project film - 12mins of sewerage inspired art like you’ve never seen before.Contemplative Shit was initially made for headphones with an accompanying map. Listeners began on top of the hill by the old water tower, then made their way via the lake to the river, finishing up at the sewerage farm where the art walk continued with performances and installations to our neighbouring studio.
Feel free to listen wherever and however you will, though headphones are recommended. Perhaps contemplate the waterways you are a part of – where does the water from your tap come from, where does the grey water and sewerage go to? Can you walk there? Can you picture your entanglement with this web of water and the passage of your excrement?
Do share your thoughts in the comments!
Without further ado, here is
Contemplative Shit: a soundwalk with water
author and voice: Julia Adzuki
soundscape: Tomas Björkdal
(water tower) The journey begins right here at the mouth at the top of the water tower with a cup to the lips liquid sliding over the tongue and all the way downstream down river to the sea. The path is underground and inside the body made of rusting leaky pipes and soft tissues a passage of water branching unseen underfoot and in to flesh rising from the earth and forming a fountain in each home at the turn of a tap refreshing every cell and organ making waves in digestion and sweeping away the waste with a flush gurgling down the drain down the oesophagus swimming away from sight becoming bodies water how does it taste? what is it's colour when you swallow? how does it sound underground when all the drains merge together? (lake) More water than not we are 3.8 billion years old what do you remember? lake body bubbling from the same ancient source living countless lives and loves through countless beings through time through clouds through oceans and rivers evaporating through leaves making rain seeping through the cracks in the pavement down for the deep fill to the dreaming water underground from which we drink. Laying on the bottom of the lake is a pipeline. It leads the sewerage from one side of town to the other, then down the river to the sewerage works. Sometimes, along the way, it leaks. Seeping sewerage into the lake and the river, and the lake and river and the sea beyond. No one really knows how much sewage leaks, but when it does a diver has to go down to fix it. To plug the ruptured intestine of our town. It is hard to invest in things that no one wants to see or know about... I've heard they are going to make a new pipeline soon... but isn't it strange that we shit in drinking water? have water toilets have rendered us nobles without concern for waste or expense? how many times a day do you flush? (river) Picture your body as a cloud of fluids suspended in human form a cloud of fluids circulating nutrients and waste creative potency in motion moving downstream You might say we are walking towards the arse end of town by the river, abundant with wild growth and bird song towards the sewerage works where the air is fecund with bacterial odour from the flourishing gardens of our guts As civilised humans we often camouflage our smells equating shit with shame or disinfection with deodorisation and although shit may smell like death it is very much alive perhaps in the way a dead body is alive no longer part of an individual but of the body, of the flesh alive with bacteria, yeasts and viruses our shit forms a lively community with an estimated 100 billion bacteria per poo times by the daily defecation of about 7000 inhabitants We are after all bodies within bodies within a body inhabiting earth and inhabited in turn by microorganisms Throughout the seventeenth century the virtues of shit were sung by alchemy, medicine, chemistry and the perfume industry some folks even went so far as to smear it on their face to preserve a youthful complexion... But use of excreta in agricultural production has been commonplace since ancient Rome and continues today in Gnesta. When the pile so fondly known as the shit heap has reached its peak it is trucked away and spread on local fields to eventually return to our plates in another form (bridge) phosphorus the light in the dark of earth the essential nutrient for life the buried treasure in urine and faeces Visiting the sewerage works some months ago, my friends and I were shown around by a Finnish sailor, who works here maintaining the engines and pumps, much as he had done on boats, just now on a different kind of sea. Opening a vent in the floor we saw the waste water rushing in first filtered from rubbish and the occasional mobile phone then Ferric chloride and an anionic polymer are added you have to be careful with the polymer, he tells us, it is caustic and can make you blind. This is the chemically assisted sedimentation process separating shit and liquid Spilling into sedimentation pools corrosive waters show signs of having eaten into the concrete and metal walls while the sludge sinks to the bottom and is moved by mechanical scrapers, pumped to a cannon-shaped machine that squeezes out the water and sends the solids to the tower where the shit gets oxygenated for a couple of days. The waters are continually released by way of a small fountain floating traces of medications and microplastics under a bridge and down river. Looking down into the tower filled with sludge, stainless steel tubes blow bubbles through the mass providing air for microorganisms to thrive the same bacteria from our bodies, from the water, digesting, gestating and gesticulating into new life forms transforming shit to gold that is earth we approach the shit heap, where the contents of the tower have been emptied getting up close with our masks and gloves, and contact microphones glued onto a metal plate gradually submerging the plate into the spongy, bubbly and surprisingly cake-like consistency of the sludge in the hope of hearing the music of microcosmic metabolism... silence beyond the range of our listening device silence as the methane slips unseen into the atmosphere what is the fragrance of the soul?
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Excellent
I lived in a house with a compost toilet for a couple of years, and I remember how, when I moved out, it felt so weird and wrong to shit in clean water.