FRAUD: A Simultaneous Agreement

A Simultaneous Agreement is Stanley Picker Fellow FRAUD’s (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo) latest body of work which centres on the circulation of nutrients and infrastructures permeating the current UK water crisis. About Examining the intimacy between the fertiliser mine and the treatment plant, the project asks, when minerals move across the earth what do they bring with them? There are 4,929 bodies of water in England, all of which are currently deemed unfit for both human and more-than-human life. Like most English rivers, the Hogsmill, which flows either side of the Stanley Picker Gallery, contains dangerous levels of chemical substances stemming from agricultural run-off and sewage overflow. Water­­ – the stuff of life – now also harbours unevenly distributed violence. Through art- and design-based approaches rooted in spatial advocacy, the project aims to unravel the complexity of corporate, financial and governmental interests that have led to wide-scale water degradation. As part of the exhibition, a glass fountain – Saharan Rock, under Panama Soil, in South African Waters – filters local Hogsmill river water with activated charcoal. The sculpture charts the recirculation of phosphate rock via the path of the NM Cherry Blossom – a bulk-carrier ship carrying contested phosphate rock from the Sahara to East Asia. In doing so, it traces sediments which build (and unbuild) worlds as they move from the shallow bench of the mine to the port warehouse and from South African tribunals to industrial farmland. The exhibition will host a consultation and public campaign to make the nearby Hogsmill River swimmable, using bathing request legislation as a tool for considering the intimacy with nutrients as pollutants, from their extraction and production to their re-circulation in water bodies (both human and non-human). Read more Toggle Installation