RiseUp application

2024, Not funded

This application for the BUA grand Challenge Responsible Innovation in Times of Transformation.

While sanitation is often seen as a problem of low and middle income countries, Western societies’ sanitation practices (defecations being flushed away using drinkable water) are unreasonable in terms of both resource management and hygiene. Even with the growing scarcity of water, it is the loss of phosphorus and nitrates for agriculture which is the most worrying, and the re-inclusion of human waste in the agriculture cycle could therefore have huge benefits. Different projects are bringing dry toilets back into our lives, and our project focuses on urban public places, with a particular lens of feminism and accessibility.

Our large group of artists and activists teams up with researchers from three BUA partner institutions and one external implementation partner to provide a large palette of expertise. Our transdisciplinary research will be facilitated by the use of an open source ICT tooling, constant exchange of ideas and results, and the practice of a radical open science philosophy. We will explore new types of sanitation eco-systems, in terms of social and hygienic spaces, hardware design and transformation of the collected waste into resources: sanitation will be apprehended as socio-technical machines.

Via a book in 2024 and an exhibition in 2025, we will present concepts born out of explorative artistic research on speculative fiction, unified with scientific research related to toilet hygiene and design sustainability. The resulting knowledge, enhanced by the contact with the public, will nurture the construction of scenarios for sanitation systems. These use cases will be further elaborated with open source hardware communities and scientifically tested for their hygiene and efficiency of produced resources. In co-creation from researchers and society settings (Reallabor), we will foster the development of community-owned and designed sanitation systems. Eventually, innovative, open source, hygienic and responsible sanitation system prototypes will be placed in public places. These new social spaces will modify social practices and structures, eventually reflecting societal stigma around urination and defecation.