Urin

Urin combines Frauke Joana’s visual explorations of urine’s various material and social cultures with four essays by Ari Níelsson. Images of kinksters engaged in watersports emerge as part of a wider dialogue with poetry that mocks the oral hygiene of antiquity, Alexander Pope crossing streams with Lyndon B. Johnson and the Ghostbusters, and questions of infrastructure that bring us into constant view of Vespasian’s truism, when introducing a tax on the urine collected from Rome’s latrines to be sold to the tanning and dyeing industries, that ‘Pecunia non olet’ – money doesn’t smell

Taking a wide-angle view on a topic inarguably universal to the human experience, Urin explores how this common wellspring quickly flows into a mess of particularities and contradictions across lines of gender, sexuality, medicine, language, industry, and urban planning, each emerging droplet catching the light in a different way.

Urin is now shipping

80 pages, full colour, stamped linen hardcover, stitched binding
Photography by Frauke Joana
Writing by Ari Níelsson