Metabolism at Enjoy Contemporary (NZ) (10.05.2024)

A portrait of a living, working ecology and the multi-species it sustains, Metabolism is a film essay that considers the body-as-land and land-as-body. Filmed around the site of the Western Treatment Plant (WTP) in Werribee, Victoria, Australia, Metabolism considers metabolism as an ambivalent process that connects external and internal forces: from chemical energy-creation within our bodies, to capitalism’s ‘metabolic rift’. For the Wadawurrung people, Wirribi-yaluk (Werribee river) is the backbone and spine of Country, a waterway that has sustained life since time immemorial. Wirribi-yaluk runs along the eastern edge of the WTP, a living and flowing entity connecting old ways with new. Since colonisation, the land, waters and air of this place have been drastically shaped to produce and metabolise food, waste, energy and water. New housing developments with names like ‘Riverwalk’ and ‘Manor Lakes’ spring up within smelling distance of effluent ponds in an ongoing process of birth, death and renewal. Through multiscalar ‘ways of seeing’, in Metabolism, bodies are porous and interconnected—from the microscopic to the planetary.