FICTILIS
Wastewater Walk
2017
FICTILIS is the collaborative practice of multimedia artists and curators Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau. They work on a project basis, across many types of media and disciplines, with ongoing interests in language and taxonomy, materialisms and waste flows, monuments and public memory, and political ecology.
Wastewater Walk is a series of performative walks leading participants along the paths traveled by human waste through mostly invisible infrastructure to treatment facilities, which embody a complex confluence of social-environmental issues around sustainability, resilience, equity, accessibility, and the psychological ramifications of urban sanitation systems. FICTILIS’s 2018 Philadelphia walk explored the built and unbuilt environment around a small section of the Schuylkill River, framing floatable plastic and foam waste as artifacts of global commodities markets, followed by a tour of the Southeast Water Pollution Control (wastewater treatment) plant, where similar deposits of petroleum-based debris were observed.
