Year
2021
Tag
Installations
The movement is small and familiar: rinse a pan, empty a sink, flush a toilet. Water carries the residue out of sight, and the household returns to order. Elsewhere, the discarded materials continue to meet. Fat binds to wipes; dirt collects; something too small to notice becomes an obstruction large enough to enter the news.
Slow Violence began with the Whitechapel fatberg in London. In the gallery, one hundred glass jars surrounded a video journey through the sewers. The contents of a hidden accumulation were laid out for inspection: an inventory of the things a city had tried to leave behind.
Installation and video · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
An autopsy without a body
The fatberg described in the exhibition research weighed approximately 130 tonnes and extended for 250 metres. Its scale was difficult to relate to the household gestures that helped produce it. We translated the reported composition into a wall of jars, with each jar standing for one percentage point.
Thirty-two held oil and fat, thirty contained wet wipes, nineteen represented ash and dirt, ten water and nine other matter. This was a visual reconstruction of the reported mixture. The arrangement brought an extraordinary object back to ordinary materials, while the sewer footage returned those separated ingredients to the infrastructure in which they accumulate.
A different clock
Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor describes destruction that unfolds gradually, often far from the places where its causes are most visible. Pollution and environmental damage do not always arrive as an event with a clear beginning and end. Their slow pace makes them difficult to narrate, and makes responsibility easier to postpone.
The fatberg gave this problem a particular scale. It was an accumulation of many actions, mediated by products, habits and infrastructure. No single jar could account for the mass underground. Read together, they made the relationship between an individual act and its collective consequences harder to dismiss.
The return of the discarded
Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror offered another way into the work: the discomfort produced by matter we have expelled from the spaces through which we recognise ourselves. Waste unsettles the division between a clean interior and a contaminated outside. Its return makes that boundary less secure.
Placed in the gallery, the jars retained the familiarity of kitchen storage and the distance of a specimen display. Their contents belonged to both. The encounter depended on recognising something already known, then following it beyond the point where the drain normally ends the story.
The film inside the installation
Follow the journey beneath the city in the original video presented within the wall of jars.
Original exhibition video · 2021 · 5 min 26 sec · Silent. Watch the exhibition film ↗
One hundred containers, one accumulation
One hundred glass jars held the materials of the visual autopsy: 32 with oil and fat, 30 with wet wipes, 19 with dirt and ash, 10 with water and nine with other matter. Individually printed supports fixed the jars to the wall. A screen and Raspberry Pi played the accompanying video within the arrangement.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- 100 glass jars and 100 printed supports
- Oil and fat, wet wipes, dirt and ash, water, other matter
- Screen and Raspberry Pi media player
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
