Medical facilities available at a modern health centre contrasted with ill health in old-fashioned housing. Colour lithograph after A Games, 1942
courtesf of the Wellcome Library, London UK
DIRT
health environment hygiene representation modernity
interview | kate forde , curator by greg barton
the filthy reality of everyday life
Greg Barton : What was the impetus behind Dirt ? Why now?
‘Dirt’, defined as dust, excrement, rubbish, bacteria and soil, forms the subject of a recent exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. The exhibition investigates the complexities of humans’ historical and cultural relationship to dirt, oscillating between the visceral and the ambivalent, using six case studies: ‘The Home’ (Delft, 1683),‘The Street’ (London, 1854),‘The Hospital’ (Glasgow, 1867),‘The Museum’ (Dresden, 1930),‘The Community’ (New Delhi and Kolkata, 2011) and ‘The Land’ (Staten Island, 2030). The works on display encompass numerous media such as etchings and scientific paraphernalia, visualising and confronting multiple facets of dirt while negotiating a range of scales from the microbial to landscape-urban. Prescient examples include British physician John Snow’s cartographic plotting of cholera-related deaths in 1855, linking the disease to unsanitary water, and Indian NGO Sulabh International’s compost toilets and biogas processing plants, conveyed through architectural models and diagrams. Formally the world’s largest municipal landfill, Fresh Kills is primarily represented by the work of Mierele Laderman Ukeles, an unsalaried artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977, adding poeticism to a site popularly fetishised via computer renderings. Lastly, the exhibition boasts an impressive public programming series of screenings, talks and even an archaeological dig, effectively increasing the porosity of the institution.
Kate Forde : The Dirt exhibition is taking place in an unmistakably filthy era. We felt it would be particularly relevant to consider this subject today, at a time when our economies are generating more waste than ever before, when over 50% of the world’s population live in cities (conventionally regarded as some of the dirtiest of places) and when there is great pressure on the planet’s resources and a need to consider how we might use, re-use and re-cycle dirt in more creative ways. Finally, we were struck by the fact that while access to basic sanitation remains a luxury for 2.6 billion people in impoverished rural and urban environments, some scientists in the West have discovered a curious appreciation for dirt. Proponents of the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ suggest that children growing up in hyper- clean environments are not exposed to the kinds of infectious agents necessary to help their immune systems develop, pointing to rising rates of disorders such as asthma and other allergic diseases.
Kate Forde is the curator of Dirt . We spoke about the exhibition in August, 2011.
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