Debris Facility
“ Metabolic Discard: On Rosie Issac’s Bathtub Analogy + Tip Test + Total Dissolved Solids”

KEY

Bathtub Analogy — 30 minute performance lecture by Rosie Isaac presented at the Stranger than fiction Symposium, 11.30am, 24 August 2024, at the Music Market in Collingwood Yards. Curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto. Re-presented at Conduction 8pm, 15 February 2024. Conducted by Debris Facility.

Metabolic discard — This text, written by Debris Facility and co-published with Conduction and West Space. It refracts Bathtub Analogy through its different iterations and mutations, at West Space, the Stranger than fiction symposium and its re-performance and installation at Conduction. Aggregating notes, memories, and spirals of Rosie’s text to sift through and filter these materials into something else, re-purposed waste a/effects.

Stranger than fiction — An exhibition at West Space, 29 June → 31 August 2024. Featuring Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Nicholas Currie, Andrea Illés, Rosie Isaac, Basim Magdy, Rä di Martino, Sammaneh Pourshafighi curated by Joanna Kitto.

Tip Test — Rosie Isaac’s artwork installed on the West Space windows and later on the threaded rods in Conduction’s walls. Consisting of Litmus test chemicals on paper, Steel strap, rare earth magnets, archival photograph, plastic ziplock bag with metal shavings. Made from blotting paper, litmus dye, cabbage dye, leachate pond water, algae. Each of the Tip Test works were made by soaking paper in a combination of Ph sensitive dyes for varying lengths of time. Once dried the 'strips' were dipped into the leachate ponds at the Darebin parklands to produce the 'tests'. The works use the chemistry of the litmus test as material and may fade with extended exposure to sunlight. One purchased print is an ongoing display at Conduction.

Total Dissolved Solids — Rosie Isaac’s artwork installed at West Space on the ceiling. Made of Chrome Hubcaps, threaded rods, rare earth magnets in the shape of a chromium molecule.

All images in this text feature Rosie Isaac's artwork or research images, and have been treated by Debris Facility.

In tip test at West Space, there are large litmus tests, attached with small magnets to a long and curved strip of steel, an uncoiled spiral which holds the works at a horizon line across the windows, blocking and reframing the views of Collingwood Polytechnic. The paper is soaked in litmus reactive dye: chemical and biological. An archival photograph of the Darebin Parklands, before ‘re-development’ is hung upside down, as well as a small plastic ziplock bag with metal shavings.

Above our heads on the ceiling is a configuration of vintage chrome hub-caps from automobile wheels, held together with steel rods and magnets, replicating the molecular diagram of Chromium: this is total dissolved solids.

Bathtub Analogy, the performance lecture, is structured by spiralling momentum, collecting the strands of material history, contextual research, relational practices that are woven into the complex site of what is now known as Darebin Parklands over the last 135 years, and a ‘Cleanaway’ landfill site in Ravenhall.

Re-fractal of edge conditions- recurrent elaboration
Mutational proliferation
Chromium to reflect and refract genetic code

There are multiple re-occurrences of wasting and transformation phenomena on the site: quarry to tip to park. It’s one example of what is played out across this continent, and much of the world. Iterations of overlayed extraction. Land is taken, the material substance of it gouged out for various uses and deployed for architecture and infrastructure. The void created is then filled with waste. The toxicity of the land then is glazed over with a veneer of family-friendly ‘nature’ and leisure.

Horse hair is taught across violin bows
Violence bowing politely before entering
Again & a Gain

Rosie Issac is led into the parklands, its haphazard archive and history through Pete, a custodian or labourer who is employed as a Park Ranger.

Fasciation is the name given to a non-lethal mutation in plants, whereby the edge of the plant’s biology is confused, refracted and re-occurs. New tissue doesn’t know exactly where to grow, so becomes a delayed and stretched out echo of the form. Oscillation of stem to leaf to flower then… A generation of noise within the form of their system of growth. A twisted body with a unique (horror-beauty) becoming.

Sheoaks, or casuarina trees are a native tree, whose long slender leaves are segmented, each strand containing a multitude of sections, gripping onto each other. Their leaves can be described as ‘equistoid’, meaning ‘like horse hair’.

A tip is a place of rubbish, post-commodity; an accumulation of waste as the necessary movement of colonial-capitalism. It spirals in parallel with the graveyard: the afterlife which is intrinsically entwined with material life. The tip is its own ecology; various new micro-and macro forms of life and death weaving together. The tip is impolite, and perverse, morbid to dwell on. We must maintain a progression, leaving waste behind and reaching forward with hunger and expansion.

Traction of tracking the weight given and taken from the earth.
Redistribution of basalt, ex-tract to construct the colonial architecture
Archeological reverse : Cracked time capsule

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The moral order of ecological life is disturbed by mutational factors: nuclear radiation tears holes through cells. Substances deemed toxic alter the ways in which an ecology or body operates.

The parkland has a number of ponds, and Darebin creek which runs through it. We are advised to not swim, or drink the water here; it is contaminated. Waste brought forth by industry and other human forces have rendered it ‘unsafe’, for non/human life resides there to navigate. The water systems on site are not generated by geology or other weather phenomena. They have been dug out.

Fractal and refraction; expanding splintered mirror of conditions.
From sites of labour, to leisure
as the covering-packaging of toxic-ecology.

Basalt: the hard and recalcitrant geological bed from which much of so-called Melbourne rests. Dug from quarries, laboured by un(der)paid and exploited humans and horses. These voids would grow to become immense, from each individual movement of removal of country to be re-formed into the materials of colonial civilisation. Order painstakingly created from the unruly materiality of the earth.

Pete refers to a ‘bathtub analogy’ of the quarry: a huge stone bath which is carved into a void. Compelled to fill the void, we fill them with what we no longer need or want: waste as re-territorialisation. An image of the horse toiling in the pit. A life consisting of labour of moving basalt. Once the horse was led down into the pit, it would never return: carving out its life through the deepening spiral towards exhaustion and death. Is the body of the dead horses dumped as waste, buried as a fellow worker, or further extracted as meat, leather and hair?

Discard: to push away from, to make waste: of what and how is made disposable, to be removed from a centre, to make material waste
Tip: as the edge, toppling the border of one state into another.
The tip border practices which are constantly maintained, administered and enforced.

We bury and dispose of dead humans in a choreography of waste: into the ground, burnt and sealed beneath granite and basalt markers; names and dates to denote a life and relations. What is to be buried, or scattered on stolen country? An enduring colonial occupation which assumes a state of perpetual entitlement.

Leachate is the contaminated water produced by landfill. rain soaking in waste, dissolving materials to make a toxic soup. Water always finds a way to flow, to be uncontained. The leachate ponds nearby to the creek bring about problems of controlling the unpredictable and relentless force of leakage. Testing the waters and soils for ‘acceptable’ levels of contamination is key to the management of land. Measurement goes hand in hand with administration of power. Litmus tests in chemistry are about reading the alkaline or acid levels of a substance. It also means something decisive, indicative. Passing the litmus test is what allows processes to proceed.

Ph testing; colour to denote chemical levels,
a perception erupting that we can’t perceive.

Filtering the leachate through sunlight, bacteria, funnel shaped ponds catch heavy metals, charcoal, and specific plant growth-exchange. Salt remains in these ponds, and cannot be easily removed. A system of purification is enacted as a diagram of management, glossed over in the form of seemingly ornamental ponds in a constructed landscape of leisure.

High levels of chromium were found in the soil, leading Pete to speculate this was the material noise causing the plants to mutate, fasciate, elaborate. Chromium is widely found in the earth, but not here, and not in these amounts. It’s used with ferrous steel to make it stainless steel; something which resists corrosion, contamination. Those smooth reflective mirror surfaces which are extremely useful for a range of uses and commodities. Electroplating is another method to use electrically and chemical solutions to coat one metal with another: shrouding and hardening of surfaces. Chrome plating has been popular in appliances and automobiles. These commodities which once having served their purpose, are put into the earth, the tip. Chrome creates a near perfect mirror surface: which refracts and bends light, the world around transforms into a surface which camouflages and removes itself from the context it is in. The ever fluctuating mirror surface of water magnetises our attention.

Ammonia is another chemical agent widely found in cleaning products, industrial manufacture , produced by bodies and excreted in urine. All chemicals that exist in ‘nature’ are also manipulated by human led forces. The poison and the cure are the same; dosage and context are key — as deployed by the Pharmakon.

The mutational overlapping movements of waste, minerals and plants are a micro-macrocosm of the spaces between life and death, ecology and toxicity, commodity and embodiment, coloniality and country which refuses to stay still. Materials flow and collide in efforts to digest, metabolise and form new life.

Waste is a commons: it belongs to nobody. It is a refusal of ownership. No one wants to maintain a relationship of responsibility to it. It's a necessary embedded death and disavowal through our consumptive needs and desires. Waste is the needed shadow which renders the solid form of ownership and property. The act of discarding, denies a relational responsibility of place. The ‘elsewhere’ of waste opens space for spiralling ethical relations, which rebound and refract through the extension of our biological need to eat and shit, which are amplified through industrial entanglements.