MY WITS OR SALTS, 2023 (ongoing)

moving image, text, performance

MY WITS OR SALTS is an ongoing research project that departs from the question, ‘what does it means to make visible the systems that deal with our bodily waste?’.

The project delves into the bodily and civic processes that we are often unaware of until something goes ‘wrong’. Shifting in scale between the body and industrial systems, through a series of absurd and humorous monologues, MY WITS OR SALTS alludes to the inseparable flows of capital, bodies and waste. From the privatisation of water, closure of public toilets, the use of urine in witchcraft and protest, and my personal experiences of living with a chronic illness; the project explores the potential of alternative temporalities (crip time, queer time, molecular time or even sewage time), to explode or subvert the normative capitalist clock.

Water infrastructure is integral to society, yet it is predominantly invisible—underground, behind walls & in the case of sewage treatment facilities, locked behind gates on the outer limits of cities and towns, commonly bordering working class communities. These spaces also have an interesting inter-species function—treatment plants are often habitats for wild birds, becoming increasingly important as ‘natural’ habitats are eroded through human impact.

MY WITS OR SALTS questions late capitalism’s ableist conceptions of the body as a closed, individualist receptacle. By making water infrastructure visible, can we gain a greater understanding of the ways in which all bodies (of water, human & more-than human) interact within an interconnected, cyclical network?

This project is currently in development and exists as a series texts, three ‘teaser-trailers’ for a longer moving image work and a series of performances and workshops.

*the title is taken from a line from the poem, Incontinence by Hahn, S. (1993) Chicago University Press