Artist Lucy Beech and poet Logan February discuss containment and porosity, thresholds and doorways, environmental time, and Out of Body – their collaborative film tracing hidden waste streams and more-than-human entanglements, soon to be presented in the New Museum’s exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future.
Lucy Beech: The forthcoming exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum, features a selection of works that explore how technological developments have inspired evolving definitions of the “human.” Our collaborative film, Out of Body,was commissioned for the exhibition and follows hidden waste streams to highlight the provisional nature of the category of the human. In the film, bodies are described as constantly interacting with forces beyond themselves: toxins in water, bacteria from other bodies, and bodily materials from species we borrow from and share environments with. The relationship between scientific innovation and mythmaking seems like an interesting place to start this conversation. What do you make of this tension – especially in relation to waste and more-than-human entanglements that are made visible in our film?
Logan February: Out of Body illuminates a material poetics of human negotiation with our living environments. Waste is proof of that negotiation. The film offers a story behind the infrastructure; I see its mythic sense as a second mind to the scientific. Both science and mythmaking apply imagination to what is observed and what is lacking. Both are ways of accounting for what happens to “us” and how we respond.
Our collaboration was a feast of unknown forms, a new process of crafting meaning. We spoke so much about the film’s medley of ideas and body of texts, both found and written, and I got to voice them – not only as a poet, but as narrator and witness. Seeing it all pulled together, the resulting essence is one of deep curiosity and contemplation, fantastically compressed in your final cut. The collaboration of poetic and visual language is expansive and overflowing.
LB: Thinking about the film’s monologues, I’m struck by how the exhibition title evokes Wilfred Bion’s experimental autobiography, A Memoir of the Future, an extract from which you perform in the third poem of our film. The title conjures the gaze of a Janus head facing multiple directions and occupying the temporalities of the past whilst embracing the disruption of the future. How do you interpret this diachronicity of the exhibition title?
LF: Many of the film’s monologues come as recollections, yet when put together, they do not quite face the past. I think of the “new humans” of the exhibition title both as us in relation to history and as the generations that inhabit the results of our modes of living.
LB: At this threshold, my mind jumps to effluents: industrial discharges flowing through rivers and stored in sediments and organisms that resurface across generations, producing reproductive harms decades later – a memory of the future.
LF: Yes, the film plants its feet somewhere within that effluent and speaks from this moment in time, firm yet fluid. Memory seeds imagination, which then seeds the future. I feel that mythos bolsters science as a parallel reckoning – a refinement. It takes record-keeping seriously without limiting us to a literal solution or the human story alone.
For me, “memories of the future” evokes a more participatory speculation, a queering of possibility and responsibility. An imagination of the future is always incomplete, dubious, while memory of the future makes space for lucidity and sense-making. A title like this returns agency to us as artists, as well as members of a complex, fraught ecology. We’re free to cross-check what now-is against what was-to-be. To confront failures and missteps, celebrate precarities overcome, to reclaim or embody anew. Do you find the title productive as a way of thinking about the temporality of the film?
LB: Yes, and it seems to describe the tension of a lot of the labour we follow in the film, which is often connected to volatile materials. In one instance, the camera journeys deep into the earth where scientists focus on geotechnical measures to permanently close a former salt mine now filled with industrial and radioactive waste. The scientists rehearse potential ruptures of the barrier they are building to protect these toxic remains. Their work is both speculative and historical, a rehearsal and a redress. It involves predicting future conditions and blocking leaks that haven’t yet occurred. The waste contained in these subterranean caverns derives from nuclear power stations, but is also naturally occurring radioactive material produced via industrial production such as medicine, biology, and agriculture – contexts we see elsewhere in the film. During this descent, you perform a poem which evokes this precarious balance between potential leaks and the dangers of over-containment. Could you describe how these themes of latency, legacy, inheritance and containment relate to the body in your poem?
LF: The poem – Bilirubin – is inspired by the larger bio-poetics at work in the film. I took a view of what the body contains: the small details that become readable in a microscope. In the case of my syndrome, it’s not dangerous despite being congenital and sometimes conspicuous. But its relation to the liver is crucial; the error is in the body’s ability to process waste and purge toxicity.
The dead cells are a kind of grief, not being filtered out, appearing as evidence in the whites of the eyes. The poem responds to the psychoanalytic inheritance from the father, as in the earlier monologue on the gut – here the autobiography is both somatic and spectral. The flawed liver becomes an embodied prophecy; a haunted gene is covertly carried along, a memory of the father. The body echoes its origin story, if we read it closely.
LB: This act of reading the body is a recurrent trope of the film. The healer reads the liver, the bacteriologist reads microbial communities in sludge, a breeder uses ultrasound to read the fertility of a horse, the psychoanalyst takes cues on a patient’s emotional containment from the borborygmi or the peristaltic sounds of the stomach. The constant need for embodied prophecy, as you’ve so beautifully named it, requires technical maintenance. This labour complicates the idea of bodies as self-governing, or “biologically autonomous”. The film shows this threshold work as endless, and here narratives around the body as sealed become almost mythical.
LF: I remember we talked a lot about ideas of containment throughout our work on the film. Particularly, I am thinking of one of my monologues and its mantra-like repetition: “My body contains nothing but myself.” I still don’t know which strikes me more: the “nothing” or the “nothing but.” They spark against each other. What makes up a body, its contents or its borders? Or an awareness of both?
Thresholds to the body (mouth and anus) are announced in the film’s first speech act. They herald consumption and expulsion, end to end, so the fascination spills over from the vessel into what flows through. This mapping of what is felt or observed onto what is sensed or abstractly perceived is alike to the impulse behind language, isn’t it? How was it for you to work with scientific theory and research in creating found poems for the script? It seems to me like going a step further from cross-disciplinary etymology, towards a co-created authorship. How does that process differ from, for instance, the way that you and I worked together on the final version of the script?
LB: I approach language like film editing, so the way I play with found technical language feels synonymous with accumulation of debris we see across the film. Scientific terms are half-familiar to me, they exist at the boundary of everyday understanding which gives them a kind of incantatory quality. “Anastomosis” for example, was the title of the first poem I sent you. In medicine/biology, anastomosis is the joining of two separate structures – the way a river meets the sea, or forks in blood vessels, nerves, intestinal loops. Anastamosis isn’t just a connection; it hints at the vital merging of passages, the alteration of flow, or the re-routing of life forces. Even before biology is understood the word carries a mythic, bodily, and relational imagery. “Ana” means “anew”, “stoma” means “mouth,” so the term literally translates to “mouth anew”. Like spells or charms, these technical terms are the unknown wrapped in language. How do you feel this compression resonates with poetry?
LF: I like this idea of the linguistic hybrid as incantation. There is also a deep intellectual pleasure in the strangeness of these words. The unknown is a poetic essential, not so much in the sense of privileging mystery as in that the medium is often brings the strange into familiarity, and vice versa. It’s a sweet spot between invention and revelation. Words are all around us, exchanged between us, but the way they coalesce within a poetic moment is, ideally, ineffable. Is it the substance or the surplus of psychic flow? I think it changes and the feeling in each instance is different.
Coming back to the idea of bio-autonomy: in social reality, autonomy works on a very limited scale. It vests us with subjectivity, maybe even agency. But our microcosms are only a summarized story – the hidden webs of ecological reliance and cellular collaboration of the film reveals a covert vastness. There isn’t much reason to closely observe the constant flux until we encounter moments of surplus, leakage, drainage, diagnosis, which rupture our sealed definitions. How did you arrive at the films larger-than-life constellation of sites beyond the body, to find its correlates and contradictions in landscape and human-made biological inventions?
LB: When I was writing Out of Body I was biking to the studio every day, passing lots of new building constructions. Berlin is built on a swamp and for new concrete foundations to be stable, construction workers pump groundwater up and away via these mesmerising, iconic pink pipes that snake across the skyline. These were designed by architect Ludwig Leo, also famous for a landmark building for studying fluid dynamics, defined by an enormous pink tube (the “Rosa Röhre”) that loops around it forming an immense water circuit. We shot part of the film in this bizarre building which resembles an eviscerated bodily organ – a colon. The architecture contains a mechanical wave simulator which I adopt in the film as a kind of peristaltic motion of a body, moving psychic material through the system.
The colon-shaped building monumentalises scientific infrastructure, a gesture that can be seen elsewhere in the city, where certain sewage pump systems were historically housed in church-like forms. Morton Schamberg and Baroness Elsa Von Loringhoven’s Dadaist ready-made God, which features in the New Museum exhibition in close proximity to our film, consists of a knotted cast-iron plumbing trap, reconfiguring modern plumbing infrastructure as divinity. Unlike the church-like sewage pumps in Berlin that speak to the power of regulating waste to the periphery, the sculpture points to the unstable threshold where the divine is messy and infrastructural and every day. I wondered if you could speak to this relationship between infrastructure and the divine.
LF: Mortality itself can be an infrastructure of the divine; the messiness makes me think of spiritual purification rites that may also involve sacrifice, dead bones, transgression, intoxication. I believe in a mystical totality that does not leave out waste and contamination, even congenital traces. Our film delves into this essence, I think, resisting shame. Corporeal and divine are equally perceived in Out of Body; either comes to the fore as the film loops. The visceral figure of the father recurs in our script (anatomical and ghostly in my poem, psychoanalytic in your adaptation of Bion’s writings). Your earlier mention of Janus also comes to mind, since I am currently obsessed with doors, these architectural elements that look backwards and forwards, fundamental to our orientation in the world.
In my native Yoruba culture, doors used to be highly symbolic, carved from wood with intricate images, sacred as well as vulgar. These traditions have faded and such symbols lose their meaning. This progress of empire, in a sense, is also seen in the sanitization and optimization of modernity which rearranges and edits out our divine symbols – the complexity and mess of totality. In my work, I’ve been frequently stopped in my attempts to learn, from carvings alone, the translation of a door. It helped that we talked a lot about thresholds while working on the film.
LB: I was also so influenced during the writing process by our conversations about threshold phenomena being like metabolism, as a system of the body that is in constant negotiation between stability, or homeostasis, and adaptation – between inside and outside. In our film, the body itself can be felt as a doorway; an architectural and communal context. Here, everything passes through everything else to continue existing. In many of the industrial contexts where we filmed, distinctions between public and private are similarly transgressed.
LF: The threshold implies both transgression and security; the door is made of rigid material. There’s something reliable, certain, about a barrier; something fixed in the function of opening and closing. The film’s journey “out of body” does something transformative with this binary. Without setting aside the subjective, its sequences take distance and enter other ecologies, visually and textually, allowing a broader understanding of the world we perceive and our place in it.
I wonder how you think of what, or how, we contain on a psychic and psychological level? Would you relate that also to environmental and infrastructural concerns, and ow do you conceive of the public and the private, in these terms? In thinking of architecture and body, I am wondering about the world as an expression of Soul/Psyche, and vice versa.
LB: This is a very interesting question. Unlike spiritual work, containment seems to be the aim for psychoanalytic work. For Bion, for example, failed containment is when raw psychic material leaks rather than being metabolized, and in the consulting room, the analyst functions as a temporary container for the patient’s unprocessed states of mind. In contrast, some sacred acts seem to point to containment as something to transgress – and this is interesting to me. Take for example the votive offering; votive practices across cultures transgress the body’s limits, and there is an acknowledgement that the body is not a sealed, autonomous container but something that can be broken apart, shared, or handed over to the divine. A bodily ailment can be given a form that can be placed and offered.
I’m thinking here again of your reference to doorways. Doorways are evocative of the ways ecosystems and bodies exchange matter, energy, and information continuously with their surroundings. This permeability makes me think of the ways diseases transcend national borders, be it via animal migration or the movement of goods and contaminated food. Pathogens do not respect territorial boundaries or the nation-state. Just as metabolism and material flows in Out of Body challenge ideas of biological autonomy and closed systems, these global transmission networks suggest that political and infrastructural responses, however hidden, are forced to embrace the porousness of boundaries. The film’s attention to liminality and transgressions between inside/outside, human/nonhuman, and public/private spaces becomes a way for me to think critically about shared vulnerability and interdependence. I wanted to challenge narratives of containment as insufficient, whether in relation to bodies, ecosystems, or political borders.
LF: I am realizing how profound these porosities can be, and how intertwined our ways of knowing are. It’s why the interplay of science and poetics in your practice – the overlaps of material and mystical, microscopic and geopolitical – are so striking. Through interdisciplinary language, juxtaposition and translation, the defied narrative of containment is a form of unclogging and revelation, even if the resolutions are yet to come. It’s a necessary view for the future.
