the poetics of nightsoil
Statement of Intent:
"Following dream waters upstream, the historian will learn to distinguish the vast register of their voices. As his ear is attuned to the music of deep waters, he will hear a discordant sound that is foreign to waters, that reverberates through the plumbing of modern cities. He will recognize that the H20 which gurgles through [the] plumbing is not water, but a stuff which industrial society creates. He will realize that the twentieth century has transmogrified water into a fluid with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed."
-Ivan Illich, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness
"Mix one part excreta with one hundred parts clean water. Send the mixture through pipes to a central station where billions are spent in futile attempts to separate the two. Then dump the effluent, now poisoned with chemicals but still rich in nutrients, into the nearest body of water. The nutrients feed algae which will soon use up all the oxygen in the water, eventually destroying all aquatic life that may have survived the chemical residues...Our excreta-not wastes but misplaced resources-end up destroying food chains, food supply, and water quality in rivers and oceans."
-Sim Van der Ryn, The Toilet Papers
The Poetics of Nightsoil is an installation exploring the aesthetics of sustainability within urban contexts. It stages a context for considering water’s intertwined relationship with modern sewage, water as limited resource, and water’s contemporary commodification as consumer product. It also offers a public environment for a valuable human resource to be experienced as something other than “waste”.
The exterior of the installation consists of seventy-five blue recycling bags filled with air, stacked to create an igloo-like structure. The piece is placed on a New York City street during a public arts festival. The interior houses a simple wooden box designed to collect humanure. No pipes or water flow through the space, the piece is self-contained. The flooring is made of sod. The East River is visible nearby. Light and sounds pass into the interior. The public is invited to interact with the installation. All proceeds are donated to a local community garden to become usable, fertile compost.Background to this project
Night soil is a euphemistic term for human “waste” that is collected intentionally. For centuries, Chinese farmers collected human excreta from roadside public latrines and used it as fertilizer in their fields. The World Bank estimates that one-third of China’s fertilizer requirements have been satisfied by night soil, maintaining soil fertility for centuries. During the nineteenth century, several European capitals (including Paris, London and Berlin) had land devoted to drying night soil. This practice used night soil as a resource to produce food by recycling nutrients, and prevented pollution caused by the inappropriate disposal of organic materials. As late as 1912, night soil collectors in Baltimore, MD cleaned 70,000 privy vaults and cesspools, then sold the night soil in 1000-gallon containers to farmers. Today in Brooklyn, at least one community garden (Hollenback in Clinton Hill) is composting humanure.
Relationship of the Poetics of Nightsoil to our previous work
This project has emerged out of a recent major work: “28 days,” which explored the aesthetics of sustainability throughout the American southwest. In this project, we addressed humans, the landscape and the built environment as forces in play. We responded to times and places when their relationality created intense points of contact that necessitated extraordinary acts of creativity and invention.
Humans face urgent environmental challenges and opportunities that are global in scale. To meet them, we will need to perform unprecedented feats of imagination, innovation, and responsiveness. Today we stand at an apex of environmental forces reaching their limits. The most powerful, urgent, and necessary action we can take as humans and as artists may be to directly respond to the sites and moments at which natural and human spheres of intensity come vividly and critically into play. And to use aesthetic experience to develop both the skills and the desire to live daily life in ways that create “more without excess.”