Night Soil

Male mermaids appear in baths; a stack of brightly painted bodies make a human pyramid on a New York rooftop; a woman dressed only in tree branches and face paint hugs a tree. Welcome to the world of Melanie Bonajo. Those familiar with Dutch-born Bonajo’s work will recognise her humorous and anarchic approach (for an earlier series, she invited a succession of women to come to her studio, undress and load themselves up with as many pieces of furniture as possible. In a later piece she displayed dozens of snatched selfies of her crying, taken over recent years). Bonajo likes to make the personal public and in doing so often explores the absurdities of the social hierarchies that inform our everyday life.
Night Soil, a series of three films, begins as you walk into a beanbag strewn Bedouin- style tent to watch the first film of the trilogy ‘Night Soil #1/Fake Paradise. This film begins with a long shot of Bonajo herself staggering blindfolded at night through the busy downtown streets of New York. A voice-over describes her attempts to root herself in a new city and to find a tea drinking ceremony where she can experience the perceived healing effects of the hallucinatory drug Ayahuasca. Fast-forward, and a group of American twenty somethings sit naked covered in body paint, in a Brooklyn apartment. The film’s narrator describes the effects of the hallucinatory drug on her. Comically, a male model suddenly appears in a mermaid tail made from a mop, and outlandish clown-like make-up, representing the hallucinations felt by the narrator under the influence of the drug.
Her second film ‘Economy of Love‘ screens in a room filled with pink light and diaphanous white curtains. Lying down on a rubberized couch available, you can continue to watch. In this film, she interviews a group of Brooklyn-based sex workers who want to ‘reclaim power in a male-dominated pleasure zone’.
In her final piece Night Soil #3 / Nocturnal Gardening, Bonajo interviews four women: a Navajo land-rights activist, a Palaeolithic revivalist, a food justice organiser and a farmer who focuses on animal well-being. Here, she explores the stories of women who are ’emphasizing sensitivity, connection and communication with other communities, plants, animals and the elements’. Nocturnal Gardening contains less of the staged interventions than the other two films in the series and in many ways conforms more to traditional documentary structures. These women’s stories – rooted as they are in their surroundings and environment – stand unadorned and free from the high jinks that often suffuses Bonajo’s work.
What links these three pieces is Bonajo’s search for a meaningful life in a world dominated by technological progress and the temptations of consumer culture. In all of the films, both nature and technology merge (Bonajo’s subjects are often filmed using smart phones and iPads to try to capture the world around them). Curator Kim Knoppers describes Bonajo as ‘a child of the era of Facebook, Instagram and Apple and, at the same time, someone who is deeply interested in beliefs, mythology, spirituality and animism.
These three films, says Bonajo are ‘largely about women who have considered the possibilities of disobedience by way of, for example, anti-capitalist medication, or just by creating different systems. It’s about women taking control of their own desires through self-determination and resistance to imposed states’. If these ideas appeal to you, then you will find a deeper look into the surreal world of Melanie Bonajo very rewarding.
Watch an excerpt from ‘Night Soil Fake Paradise’ here
Listen to Bonajo talk about her photographic work

FOAM Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam, 16 September – 7 December 2016