(para)site: a discharge of cultural sewage, live performance, zack mennell, 2022.
Videography & editing by Studio MaBa (Baiba Sprance & Marco Berardi)
Videography & editing by Studio MaBa (Baiba Sprance & Marco Berardi)
(para)site: a discharge of cultural sewage
2022
The first iteration of the project was an exhibition of photography, moving image, collage, assemblage and performance which took place at VSSL studio in Septemeber 2022.
(para)site was commissioned as part of Tidechangers, a developmant programme for early career artists by The Thames Festival Trust and presented as part of Totally Thames 2022. The project has been supported by VSSL studio and Deptford X.
(para)site performance documentation on Deptford Foreshore























photos by Milo Robinson for Thames Festival Trust, 2022
(para)site
installation documentation at VSSL Studio
photos by Milo Robinson for Thames Festival Trust, 2022








(para)site began with a vision; I can't remember if it was waking or sleeping. There is a person, an alive, moving body swaddled in puffy white diapers. This person slowly approaches a body of water and walks in upright, never swimming. Being both viewer and nappy-being in this vision, I feel the weight of the diapers absorbing the environment. I feel my skin infringed upon by the water and its microscopic aberrations & pollutants. I feel the pressure around my ribcage and the silted ground under my feet. My nervous system begins bursting with adrenaline as the realisation sets in that I cannot swim well, if at all, let alone weighed down by 26 diapers. The vision ends as the water swallows my shoulders, meeting the submental space of my chin.
* * *
IFLISWATIA (I Feel Like I Should Write All This In Acronyms).
Walking away from the entrance of St Thomas' A&E (accident & emergency), I take all these papers to the river. The river will make sense of them. The river will keep flowing. The river will take me with it. The river will wash my records clear. The river will take me downriver. The river will take me home.
Tangled within the residue of the city and the detritus of you, its people, I find myself downstream, but not yet at the chalky gorges and metal industrial estates of my childhood. Fishing myself from the water, I crawl up a wood corridor in the riverbank, ascending stairs to spite the undercurrents. Oozing liquids unknown, I drag myself through the town to a small space with a glass wall; here, I begin to unpack all that I am and have been and everything I have collected along the way.





(para)site video work, zack mennell, 2022. Videography & editing by Baiba Sprance of Studio MaBa.
scans of (para)site generative collages, zack mennell, 2022.