The Wellcome Trust’s Dirt Season

Running in the UK from March to September 2011, the Wellcome Trust’s Dirt Season features a major exhibition ‘Dirt: The filthy reality of everyday life‘ at Wellcome Collection, an online game Filth Fair, a BBC series “Filthy Cities“, and a series of “dirty” events throughout the country.

The Wellcome Trust funds a wide-range of health research activities, especially biomedicine, also in developing countries. As part of its African Institutions Initiative, the Trust funds SNOWS – the Scientists Networked for Outcomes from Water and Sanitation consortium of universities that aims to build African capacity for interdisciplinary research on water supply, sanitation and environmental health.

Below a picture from the Dirt exhibition’s image gallery and the trailer to Paromita Vohra’s film ‘Q2P’.

India, 2007. A group of scavengers, including a 14-year-old boy, fully engaged with their every day usual work of cleaning the human excreta from the septic tank of public toilets. Photo: Senthil Kumaran/Trikaya Photo

‘Q2P’ peers through the dream of Mumabi as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets in Bombay with a small detour in Delhi, watching who has to queue to pee. By observing who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we learn about gender, class, caste and “most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis”.

Web site: Dirt Season