The Snail That Drank the Sea Dry, The Sewer That Is Neither, The Crow That Found a Washhouse

‘Sanitary Fables – The Snail That Drank the Sea Dry, The Sewer That Is Neither, The Crow That Found a Washhouse’ brings together three fables and is the work that most closely embodies the essence of the ‘Sanitary Fables’ concept. Within a single frame, the landscape of this place and of a place far away shimmer and overlap like the surface of water. The stone paving of a washhouse, light, water, and the presence of those who live there merge in a poetic montage composed of fragments from different origins.

Water appears simultaneously as a boundary and a connecting element; it carries movement and exchange, but also disease. The story of clean and unclean cannot always be told apart.  Through this work, Natsumi Aoyagi confronts us with the instability of the line that public hygiene has drawn between the pure and the impure, and with the question of whose ‘livable life’ that line serves.

This work forms part of a broader project dedicated to Lisbon’s water infrastructures and public hygiene systems.

The film will be shown on a continuous loop throughout the listed hours on both days.