A new installation by the Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê that shows the backbreaking harvesting of guano—bird droppings, which are a highly prized fertiliser—on uninhabited Pacific islands, opens today (25 August) in Peckham, London.
The three-screen film The Colony, produced by the non-profit art commissioning organisation Artangel, is being screened in a disused building that once housed one of London’s oldest cinemas, the Eclectic Theatre.
The work follows both the nesting seabirds—using two drone cameras—who create the guano, and the workmen who collect it on the Chincha Islands near Peru. Guano, whose global market crashed in the early 20th century due to the advent of chemical fertilisers, has become popular again thanks to the “green movement”, the artist says.
“Oh god, it smells so bad. And we had to wear protective gear because of the ammonia,” adds Lê, who, along with his small team, camped for several nights on the islands, which have no electricity or running water.
Guano was so highly prized in the 19th century that Spain tried to seize the islands by force and the US passed a law encouraging its ships to take (peaceful) possession of any unoccupied guano islands. The artist had read about the islands in high school but it was only when Artangel approached him with the commission that he was able to make a work about them as they “are connected to England”, Lê says. In the 19th century, the UK was the biggest buyer of Peruvian guano in the world and set up global trading networks.
Today, it is still collected using a “19th-century labour process”, Lê says. The workers stay on an island for around six months, working from 5am until 11.30am before it gets too hot, shovelling the dung into 50kg sacks. These are then stacked in huge structures to await collection by ship. “When we arrived by boat they looked like pyramids from below. My jaw dropped,” Lê says.
Before the film could be made, there were some protracted negotiations with the two government departments, for conservation and harvesting, Lê says. They feared that the artist might harm the birds while filming or that he was making an “expose” on the working conditions of the labourers.
The islands are well managed by the Peruvian government, he adds, with guano harvesting only taking place on an individual island every ten years. At this point, the accumulated droppings have reached chest height. The birds, mostly Peruvian boobies, are also protected, along with their main source of food, anchovies.
The Colony has been commissioned by Artangel, as well as Ikon gallery, Han Nefkens H+F Collection and Proyecto Amil. Artangel’s recent commissions include Jorge Otero-Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust, a 50-metre-long translucent latex cast inside Westminster Hall (until 1 September), and Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (4 September-30 October), a group show inside a disused jail, which includes artists such as Marlene Dumas, Roni Horn and Ai Weiwei.
