“Oh Shit!” is what the name of the exhibit translates to. It is temporary, but will be open until March 2023. One hopes that all Covid issues with traveling and visiting will not interfere.
What is aims to do is what I hope this blog contributes to: creating a dialog about, and an awareness of, a substance that we all produce but will not talk about. It is partnering with H2O Innovation for obvious reasons: sewage pollution, aka shit in the waters, is a big issue – and a waste of something that is a resource, containing fertilizing elements as well as being a potential source of energy.
The exhibit deals with all those topics – the science of human waste – but it also aims to present something new, something that few museums have yet presented: a different view of human shit, our relationship to it through the ages, and an attempt at showing its true value, hence the gold-plated ceramic turd at the entrance. According to the organizers, this is the first time that a scientific overview of shit, from the intestinal biome to its ecological aspects, is paired with topics such as shit in art, and the sociology of it.
It has not always been a taboo discussion topic, for instance; in renaissance France, a common greeting about one health was “comment va la selle?”, as in “are you pooping well?”. According to the exhibit curator, this may well be the origin of the ubiquitous “comment ca va?” greeting of nowadays. We say “how’s it going?” in English, a greeting that could well have a similar origin.
The exhibit itself is in French and English. There are reproductions of ancient toilets from the Roman era, and even a video game that teaches a remarkable amount of information on everything shit, they say.
There is some info in English here, but a much better overview (in French) can be found on Radio-Canada (with a good video) here or on the museum site here.
The culture of what we flush 