Holy Shit: A 24-Hour Totemic Ritual

You are what you waste!

What if our waste could become a mirror of who we are?

HOLY SHIT is a collective experiment exploring the material traces of our everyday existence. We approach dry waste as a Social Skin: the material evidence of our presence in the world, carrying the habits, memories and contradictions of our daily lives.

Bringing together the waste produced over 24 hours, participants work in small communities to negotiate, combine and bind their individual scraps into a single collective Totem. Through an animistic approach, this newly formed entity is given an identity, a name and a presence.

Finally, the Totem is released into a space chosen by the group, becoming a material ghost haunting our everyday environment. Its fate is left to the public: will it be recognised as an artwork or dismissed as discarded waste?