Lucy Beech: Working with Waste

The exhibition Working with Waste by the British artist Lucy Beech explores relationships between waste, creativity, and transformation, and grew out of an ongoing exchange with various practitioners from different fields, including environmental science, literary theory, and medical history. Beech’s main medium is film. The narratives presented at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art exist at the intersection of documentary, fiction, and poetry and are constructed by blending hybrid materials into screenplays. Questions of flow and blockage in these works pertain not only to individual guts and urban drainage networks but also to understandings of creativity. Thinking is, for Beech’s films, a metabolic and digestive process.

While making these works, the artist spent time shadowing drain experts and scientists involved in sewage treatment. This task of stabilizing sludge and monitoring microbial diversity in wastewater—a riot of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa—reveals the work involved in maintaining the fantasy of the human-animal divide. Entanglements between species and the blurry boundaries between waste and use are the focus of Beech’s films on show at Edith-Russ-Haus, which are invested in materials that don’t fit neatly into categories and intimacies that prove difficult to forge and maintain.

Alongside their own work Beech has invited works by filmmakers Riar Rizaldi, James Richards, and Steve Reinke which are shared within the wider scope of the exhibition. These films also evolved through collaboration and invest care and attention in otherwise discarded or surplus materials. The Working with Waste exhibition began life as a research group that Beech founded and in which both Rizaldi and Richards participated. In this context, group activity grew out of a series of questions: What kinds of creativity are involved in reactivating waste materials? What are the rhythms, values, and historical legacies attached to working with waste across different disciplinary spheres? How do attitudes to waste shape infrastructures and norms?

To realize this multipart exhibition, the Edith-Russ-Haus collaborated with Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg. Each of the three exhibitions foregrounds different aspects of Beech’s collaborative and research-based practice and forms its own focus through the selection of works and their presentation.

Lucy Beech was the 2021 recipient of the Media Art Grant from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art.