Zeelie Brown: the world’s most beautiful septic tank
Zeelie Brown @ cHURCH OF MONIKA
the world’s most beautiful septic tank
January 17th, 2021
Sunday, 11am
on ZOOM, Meeting ID: 864 5409 2996
In the Black Belt, a region that I grew up on the southern extreme of, people are forced by poverty, state neglect, and shrink-swell soils to straight pipe human waste from their homes into a field behind it. The Black Belt is so named for the color of the soil, and later, because it grew the best cotton in the state it became the center of Alabama’s plantation culture and thus the blackest part of the state. It is also the poorest, and one of the most systematically discriminated against. Beyond the smell, mosquitos breed in the waste and spread disease. It contaminates the soil leading to problems like a 35-55% prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes county, a disease that should be eradicated in the United States. 90% of Wilcox County which is 71.1% black had an unpermitted sewage system in 2016. It’s not uncommon to see freshwater lines cross raw sewage.
I am working with Group Project, MIT’s National Organization for Minority Architecture Students, and the MIT Department of Architecture for a beautiful, cosy, well-ventilated outhouse:
- milled to be shipped in an IKEA-style flat pack
- using techniques inspired by Japanese joinery via CNC so design elements can be both beautiful and mass-producible that
- costs about $300-600 to set up
- that uses composting and humanure techniques so it doesn’t smell
- and could be built by 3-4 men in the time it takes for them to get through a box or two of beer.
Eventually, this research will move in the direction of affordable housing.
Bio:
Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. She makes Black, queer refuges called “soulscapes”, borne from this sense of wilderness. Soulscapes are a gumbo melding sound, cello performance, installation, electronic, culinary, textile, process and performance art. These media, these soul-foods simmer together with the Alabama folk arts they learned as a child on their rural homestead to, somewhere deep within the viewer, lay a road down home.
Soulscapes are refuge: refuge from centuries of state ordained theft and genocide sculpting, financing, and informing the very concept of art; refuge expressly for Black, queer people; refuge from hatred and ignorance that threatens to drown the land her ancestors are buried on; refuge from those whose wallets grow fat from selling black communities downriver; refuge.
Soulscapes live in-between the river and the sea, in rage, in salvation, in domesticity, in the blues, in creoles, in sweet lies told with a smile and crooked teeth, in gris-gris and mojo hands.
Soulscapes live at dangerous, shifting crossroads because when you are born Black in America you are born nailed to the cross.
Soulscapes live in the break.
Zeelie makes music that lives in the break, too.
