World Toilet day

19^th November.

Do you know your shit?

World toilet day is a worldwide initiative aimed to raise awareness and inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis, every year on the 19^th November. We discussed the idea of arranging some sort of event to raise the awareness of the issue, we could do it within the university and also around Birmingham city centre.

So what s the big deal? Well, over 1000 children die every day due to diseases caused by poor sanitation – that seems to us a crisis which can be solved with good sanitation systems. (http://water.org/water-crisis)

Initial ideas for the event included dressing up as poo emoji’s but it was clear this was too serious…

Static strategy. Something we can exhibit within the university, the facts and figures of the issue, opposing conditions maybe? To be developed, but early thoughts are about posters or some kind of information stand. Mobile strategy. The idea’s simple, wheels on a toilet and take it for a walk. A stunt, basically something to spike an interest in the event and make people question it, why a toilet today? Francis Alÿs creates similar actions to explore subjects in this way and documents both the process and results. The aim isn’t to show off a toilet on wheels but to interact and discus global sanitation issues with people. Needs to be developed further but we’re thinking of creating a newspaper or something we could hand out with key information on and then also something more engaging, maybe signing the toilet or drawing on toilet roll?