‘Effluent Ecologies’ is a moving image work and creative research project that starts with 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’re often unaware of until something goes ‘wrong’. Shifting in scale between the body and industrial civic systems, through a series of absurd, shocking and humorous monologues, ‘Effluent Ecologies’ alludes to the inseparable flow between 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 chronic illness; the project examines the potential of alternative temporalities (crip time, queer time, molecular time and 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, often 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.

Framed by Stacey Alaimo’s term ‘trans-corporeality’ (2010), which acknowledges that human is inseparable from “the environment”—both constantly on the move and resulting in unpredictable/unwanted outcomes, ‘Effluent Ecologies’ questions late capitalism’s ableist conceptions of the body as a closed, individualist receptacle. By making water infrastructure visible, is it possible to open a space of a dialogue around sick, crip, dying and (above all) leaky bodies & interrogate the ways that all bodies (water, human & more-than) interact within an interconnected, cyclical network?