You've just been to Milan Design Week and you think you may have seen some real shit? Well, you actually did. There was indeed an entire installation dedicated to it at the Società d'Incoraggiamento d'Arti & Mestieri (SIAM).
Entitled "The Shit Evolution", the event was conceived by architect Luca Cipelletti in collaboration with Gianantonio Locatelli, agricultural entrepreneur and owner of the Castelbosco-based Museo della Merda (Shit Museum), a dairy farm in northern Italy where 2,500 cows produce thousands of litres of milk every day and over 100,000 kgs of dung as well.
The installation wasn't just a celebration of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" (a 1961 artwork consisting of 90 tin cans filled with faeces), but featured a series of design and architectural elements – bricks, tiles, flower pots, hilariously surreal yet extremely apt (think about all the crap chairs and seats you see during Milan Design Week…) toilet-shaped seats, and, yes, even simple clean-cut tableware in a traditional style – made in a material called "Merdacotta".
An obvious pun on the word terracotta, Merdacotta is a mixed material, obtained by processing the cow dung produced at Locatelli's farm through a sophisticated system that employs industrial digesters (you can check out the processes to make Merdacotta on the Museo della Merda YouTube channel, hilariously called the "Shit TV").
After extracting methane and urea (and therefore removing the bad smell; note that the methane from the dung is employed to produce energy and heating for the museum), the material is dried and mixed with straw, farm waste and clay (depending on the items that will then be produced), moulded and baked at high temperatures.
The SIAM installation started in the courtyard and took visitors through a series of rooms displaying various objects made with Merdacotta, plus artworks (cans in memory of Manzoni's "Artist's Shit"; shit paintings by Roberto Coda Zabetta, made mixing shit and pigment…) and video installations (including "The Phantom of Liberty" by Surrealist Luis Buñuel in which a dining table accessorised with a toilet also appear) and fossilised faeces from 200 million years ago.
Merdacotta seems to combine in a successful way innovation, nature and sustainability, and this could become an interesting material when applied to architectural and interior design projects or could maybe be applied to more glamorous purposes: the more you look at the clay-like consistency of Merdacotta, the more you wonder if it would be possible to come up with a jewellery collection in Merdacotta (a really "shit" collection…) or if it would be possible to 3D print an object using Merdacotta (well, there have been experiments to make 3D printed clay items after all).
"Shit Evolution" was a wider and improved version of a previous event showcased last year in Milan, but visionary Cipelletti has now got bigger ambitions – a pavilion made out of Merdacotta bricks and even entire houses. Think Merdacotta is a rather bizarre idea? Think twice, and don't laugh: "Shit Evolution" won Cipelletti the Milano Design Award 2016 with the following motivation: "for the story of a great complexity and innovation, able to destabilise the common perception. The didactic course undermines all the academic stereotypes to propose relevant sensory experience that promotes a new vision of design culture." Never understimate the potential of real crap design. No shit!
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