Merdacotta

Excrement as a conceptual basis for investigation is nothing new, last year it formed the focus of Design Academy Eindhoven’s show ‘Eat Shit’. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has been exploring it for a while now and many others have also been investigating how we can re-appropriate waste. 

In Piacenza, a province of Northern Italy, you can find the Castelbosco Farm, home to 2500 pedigree cows that produce over 30,000 litres of milk daily supplying the local Grana Padano cheese industry. 

In addition to this milk, the cows also produce 100,000 kg of dung daily - to put that in perspective that weighs the same as approximately 12,650 of Arper’s Catifa Chairs. That is a lot of anything frankly, so farm owner Gianantonio Locatelli, decided to make use of it. 

Locatelli first installed equipment to extract the methane from the dung in order to use it as an energy source. He then uses the remains as fertiliser and also to create, in conjunction with his Museum of Shit colleagues, a material known as ‘Merdacotta’. 

The Shit Museum is housed within the restored late-medieval Castelbosco castle, and is heated by the engines that use the extracted methane as an energy source. The Museum describes itself as “an agency for change, a research and data-collection institute, housing documents and information on excrement in culture, technologyand history. And it also has an enzymatic role: it dialogues with artists, scientists and institutions on ideas and projects linked to the value of faeces and its endless uses, both current and yet to be imagined.” 

The Museum Of Shit relocated to Milan for the duration of Salone 2016. Housed in a palazzo in Via Santa Marta, the installation sought to tell the story of the museum, it’s products and of course excrement itself. Exhibits included contemporary art, anthropology, architecture and archetypal objects. On show were products made from Merdacotta, a mixture of Tuscan clay and dung. (The methane and urea are extracted from the dung making it entirely odourless).

These objects sat alongside art installations and collaborations with the likes of Dirty Furniture magazine. One of our favourite moments was the screening of a scene from Luis Buñuel’s film the Phantom of Liberty, where the dining room and toilet are coupled. Sublimely ridiculous. In other room there was also Resurrection a film by Daniel Spoerri (the story of a shit which becomes a steak once more). All showing cultural, artistic and societal issues and contributions about the material. It was a light-hearted approach that addressed some serious issues about how we look at waste.

This article originally appeared in our Milan 2016 edit. See the review in full here.