Multi-Channel Video Installation Feb 10 to Mai 5, 2024 Detrius - waste, creativity and transformation

Opening Feb 9, 2024, 7 p.m.

Format a composition of theatre, reading, cinematic narrative and the process of creative waste management 

Artist-filmmaker Lucy Beech

Venue Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (KvHB) - Train Station, above platforms 3 and 4, Hannoversche Straße 85, 21079 Hamburg 

Host & Organizer KvHB in cooperation with the following foundations:  Hamburgischen Kulturstiftung, K.S. Fischer-Stiftung as well as Rudolf Augstein Stiftung

More Details (in German language: access programme via mouse click)

Press release Detritus is part of a series of exhibitions by the artist-filmmaker Lucy Beech that explore relationships between waste, creativity and transformation. The show’s centrepiece is a new multi-channel video installation that wears its creative waste on its sleeve. Detritus references the form and content of the film, which is an accumulation of disintegrated material and debris from the process of making. The outcome oscillates between a play, a reading, a cinematic narrative, and a process of creative waste management. At times visual material occupies all channels super widescreen, at others b-roll and film scraps are collaged on separate screens. Evoking the messy and unrestricted aspects of creative composition this expanded cinematic experience developed out Beech’s interest in ‘wasteways’, or the role humans play in generating, ignoring, coping with or analyzing waste in its various manifestations.

Based on a poem by the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the film’s underlying narrative depicts a coming-of-age story of the teenage protagonist Beatrix, who moves through delayed grief and the quasi-sensory experiences of her deceased father. As Beatrix works to build a sense of self in the absence of her parents, her thoughts and dreams meander through landscapes and sewers following the path taken by evacuated bodily waste. Her childhood memories are conflated with scenes from agricultural farms and laboratories, where scientists monitor microbial diversity in sludge. Questions of flow and blockage pertain not only to individual guts and urban drainage networks but to understandings of creativity and an embodied experience of grief.

At the end of the original poem, Sedgwick discloses the waste of her working process as notes, including revisions, offcuts and alternate plot lines. She serves her creative leftovers in their fragmented state, referencing the moment of writing poetry within the tableau of the poem itself, taking Sedgwick’s poetic waste as an invitation for artistic interpretation Beech experiments with the poem’s discordant flows. The cinematic outcome is a constant interplay between language, music and imagery where boundaries between states of being are constantly collapsing and waste processing is ongoing and integral.

The exhibition is the conclusion of a multi-part series in cooperation with the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg and the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. Each of the three exhibitions has focused on different aspects of Beech's collaborative and research-based practice and forms its focal point through the selection of works and their presentation.