There's a Literal "Museum of Shit" Opening in Italy

Featuring bioluminescent installations, methane heating, and, of course, artifacts, it's the cultural institution you always wanted (but were too afraid to ask for).

by Rubén Moldes

May 11, 2015, 4:00pm

Photos via The Shit Museum, unless otherwise noted

A version of this article originally appeared on The Creators Project Spain.

No matter how hard you try to hide it, shit is an important part of who we are as a civilization. In a sanitized world, you might think your only relationship to poop involves sending it out to sea with the push of a button, but your opinion would be different if you, like me, had grown up on a farm surrounded by vast quantities of organic waste.

It's been present in everything—or, almost everything—from prehistory, to the present day. It was fertilizer and fuel in ancient times and biofuel today, a raw material for construction, and both a medium and subject for art and cinema (looking at you, John Waters). Thus, the creation of The Shit Museum makes sense for its recognition of a material "that gives life and energy […] and which has been wrongly considered worthless" according to one of its founders, Massimo Torrigiani.

On a farm in the province of Piacenza, near Milan, where 2,500 cows eat and get fat to produce the milk that makes Grana Padano cheese, the cattle also generate an enormous amount of manure. Gianantonio Locatelli, the owner of the farm, began reusing it for methane, natural fertilizers, and construction materials, and was eventually inspired to create The Shit Museum. The Castelbosco castle, where part of it is housed, completes the "museum" context: its rooms, warmed with a heating methane, contain a collection of materials that detail the history—and future—of poop.

Brick made of excrement, via Il Grido .

Promoter Luca Cipelletti explains that the museum "is deliberately provocative and, at the same time explanatory enough to encompass the idea of a major project that unites tradition and innovation, art and technology." Through its website, and through working with public and private institutions, universities, archives and research labs, the museum aims to develop projects by bringing poop online, too.

The Shit Museum opens to the public in summer 2015, and will present works based on the production of renewable energies, such as Alberto Pasetti's Bioluminescent Bacteria: a Simulation, outdoor installations on the farm by David Tremlett and Anne & Patrick Poirier, audiovisual work Michael Badura, Gianfranco Baruchello, and Claudio Costa, and as fragments of the film Le Fantôme de la liberté by Luis Buñuel.

Check out some photos of The Shit Museum below: