Shit Museum in Italy converts lumps of pungent cow dung into pottery

Team Udayavani, Aug 3, 2021, 10:28 AM IST

Source: Shitmuseum.org

Shit Museum, or Museo Della Merda, is a literal research facility-cum-poo-repository that converts lumps of pungent cow dung into pottery and luminescent science projects. It is located in a rural stretch of northern Italy 62 miles outside Milan.

The Shit Museum was established in 2015 inside a medieval castle. The museum aims to make positive use of the manure surplus produced by the 3,500 cows on founder Gianantonio Locatelli’s dairy farm, which also supplies 55 tons of milk a day to the Grana Padano cheese company.

Locatelli’s farm extracts methane to produce electricity, which is then sold alongside the museum’s signature brand of fertilizer but nothing beats the highlight of the farm, “Merdacotta” artifacts, which are elegantly assembled from repurposed shit.

Artists including David Tremlett and Anne and Patrick Poirier have created interventions that elevate the topic above the purely functional at a space that is frankly quite the opposite of its subject — its bare-bones aesthetic more closely resembling inner-city art spaces, concept stores, or bleeding-edge restaurants than a sewerage works.

 

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The Shit museum features tableware, furniture, pots, and vases, mixing their primary ingredient with Tuscan clay for an authentic finish.

Below are few images from the museum.

Source: Shitmuseum.org