Through exploring the infrastructures and directional frameworks in which waste is governed, I intend to create an audiovisual piece that probes the function of the drain
as a border, contractor, announcer. The drain, an active mediator, situates waste 'below'–morally and topologically. This positionality is maintained through social contracts which figure as automatic, necessary and protective. Thinking with Christof Migone's reflections that 'a dam can accomplish its functions of containment, but only as a never-ending task of vigilance...it is always containing, and thereby itself contained', I seek to unpick how regulatory waste systems are defined by their bondage to detritus rather than efficient management of it. The current construction of London's Tideway Tunnel (aka the Super Sewer, Europe's largest infrastructure project, slated for completion in 2025), will serve as an entry point to explore the axis of scale and dominance that seeks to match the exponential threat of effluence. I hope that through being part of the programme I can map, through collaboration, discussion and feedback, waste's governing of interior/exterior dichotomies and incontinence as a relational practice which troubles fixed subjectivities.
My work orbits themes of thresholds, funkiness, expulsions and incontinence. I'm interested in expressivities which traverse 'boundaries' and trouble the binaries of inside/outside, waste/non-waste. The expressivities I explore span the sonic (screams, laughs, blurts, cries) the material (waste, detritus) and the relational (love, coupledom, intimacy). During a residency completed at Trinity Square Video 2021, I created Altitude Above Hygiene, a digital tract surfacing nightlife pasts from waste and architectural incontinence. The tract attunes to the slippery grammar of effluence, remembering with and from the imagined (and residual) waste of ecstatic encounters. Through my essay writing practice I have explored how edges are surveyed through the careers of Black musicians, such as D'Angelo's 10-year career break after a scandalous meteoric rise and Betty Davis's guttural screams which breached the expectations of her as an artist, wife, lover.