Julia Grillmayr is a cultural studies scholar, journalist and science communicator who spends most of her time in the muddy danubian wetlands. In this episode Julia shares her research into sewage sludge and experience visiting five waste-water treatment plants in Austria in the preparation for “Klärschlamm” (Sewage Sludge), an exhibition at WUK which she co-curated with Eva Seiler in 2020. 

For Julia, sewage sludge is an interesting opaque substance that is never pure but instead made up of many different sediments. It is disgusting and unsettling, watering down the boundaries of alive or dead, active or passive, technical or organic, subject or object. It can therefore act as a metaphor for how the human and non-human are entangled in naturecultures - a fusion of nature and culture that recognizes their inseparability in ecological relationships.

Sewage sludge becomes an accomplice in an attempt to conceive a “nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle” (Haraway 2016).

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