(para)site as a project started as a vision, a mixture of the unsettling, the humorous, and invariably the kinky. In this dream, a humanoid being is walking forward into a murky body of water, its white arms, legs, torso, and head all puffy and inorganic, made of nappies that become laden with the liquid it enters as it steadily submerges into the depths. From there, a series of video works, performances, collages, and photographs emerged by bringing this corrupted version of the “Michelin Man” to life on the Deptford Foreshore in 2022. I explored my symbiotic relationship to the welfare state and the environment. I sought out the hidden histories of the queer, disabled, and working classes that clustered and entangled with the Royal Dockyard; its remnants of significant historic infrastructure still litter the area. I began cruising the filthy, polluted river, history, and my own archive of DWP and NHS letters, seeking new relations to sticky, corrupted subjects. In this process, I felt like I, or the diaper being, was being called downriver to where I grew up on the Northern Banks of the Thames in Thurrock, Essex.
This call from home, call from the landscape, call from something inhuman, other-than-human, more-than-human, latched onto my psyche and my spirit, and it was this year that I was able to answer it, not just to call back, shouting into the echoey dense river fog, but to meet it at its source. In my new short film, A Sea Change, new beings convene in the strange post-industrial middle ground that surrounds and suffuses my childhood home. This is a terrain marked by centuries of human intervention – extraction, industry, trade and decline. Retail parks and housing estates are built over historic sites; the chalklands are cut through with ancient Deneholes; quarries gape like hungry maws; rubbish rises from landfill burial grounds; animals and plants reclaim former sites of industry, collapsing structures and making strange new homes.
Part of bringing new beings to life in my practice of mutating the folk tradition of mumming was to lean more into the legible crossovers with desire. Mumming is the practice of wearing a costume or mask to appear as mythic and folkloric figures and to act out a play or ritual in the community; these processions and performances often mark significant moments in winter and spring. For the diaper being, it speaks to a medicalisation of my body, communicating obtusely about my compromised bladder, an organ that has been “maladapted” since I was born, but also it speaks to desire, to pissplay and of course to fetish. A new rubber-gloved being emerges, roiling in the mud and fox shit between chalk cliffs of an overgrown, landslip-prone site of special scientific interest. This hazmat-suited, rubber-booted factory worker seeks out the Neanderthals who lived there 200,000 years ago, mingling with the remains of brown bears, rhinoceros, bison, mammoths, elephants, and tortoises, anticipating the butchery and the fuckery.
In returning “home” to this place I’m estranged from through choice and circumstance, old anxieties and paranoias surfaced. Memories of growing up unable to obscure my faggy voice and tender mannerisms from the aggressive and violent homophobia at school and in public. I quickly learnt that the benefit of living in the satellite ring of the London commuter belt was that there was always a train to hop on to reach the swaddling, energising, anonymising mass of the city. That was my safe place where I saw, met, and was surrounded by out and public gay culture and adults, but also the place to meet other teenage queers, having connected through the wonders of the internet. Going back to the place laden with the burgeoning desire and shame I felt, I felt nervous. Part of the benefit of working in public settings for performance or filming is the encounter with an unknowing public; this is also a risk. I felt like a teenager again, scared of other teenage boys, holding my breath in anticipation of the parroting of homophobic slurs.
While filming one section in a former quarry, swaddled in diapers and insulated from the cold January air, anonymised by the mask covering my head. A group of young teenage boys had been passing one by one back and forth, seemingly seeking each other out in the warren of birch trees, chalk cliffs, lakes, and compacted mounds of earth, silently passing by, their gaze held on my prone, nappy body. Once all together, you could hear them before you could see them, laughing and talking loudly, their occasional shouting and shrieking echoing through the interlinked gorges. They passed by our filming location once more, falling quieter but emboldened by their collective energy. Now was the moment something would happen, I worried. Some words were said as they passed by, laughing. Looking at my collaborators gathered around the camera and sound recorders on their tripods, one of them started giggling. What was said? It can’t have been the aggression that I anticipated. All I could hear was my own breath, my ears enveloped. Listening back to the recording, the footsteps brush through the wet grass and fallen leaves. There is some breathing. One of the boys says, “Oh, look! It’s a white gimp!” The others laugh. So now I have the record of an astute reading of this creature, submitting to the landscape, parasitically suckling on the society it cannot exist without.
zack’s new short film A Sea Change will premiere as part of COMMON HOST, a weekend programme of performances, a workshop, and an exhibition produced by Future Ritual at Peckham’s Safehouses, 13th – 15th March. Booking is essential.
Go to futureritual.co.uk for more information.
More about zack mennell
zack frequently collaborates with performance artist Martin O’Brien. Their series of photographs titled Whistling as the Night Calls, which explores their long-term collaboration, was exhibited by Future Ritual at VSSL Studio in November 2024. zack also documents performances and live events using only analogue 35mm film. They participated in O’Brien’s performances during his 2023 Whitechapel Gallery residency. In the same year, zack was an invited contributor and cover artist for the Addiction Recovery Arts Network’s magazine, Performing Recovery.
zack is a member of the Liberty Advisory Group, which provides collective oversight for Liberty, the Mayor of London’s flagship festival for D/deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent artists. They hold a studio at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre and are a member of the Metal New Artist Network and the Bethlem Artists Collective. Additionally, they are part of TOMA (The Other MA) 2024/25 cohort, a professional artist development program based in Southend-on-Sea. zack was awarded an Arts Council England DYCP grant in November 2023 and recently completed New Dialogues, a visual art research commission for the British Art Network and Outside In, which explores archives of art historically created in mental health settings.
zack contributed text to Dolly Sen’s Birdsong From Inobservable Worlds (2024), a commission supported by Unlimited and Wellcome Trust, published by Cuckoo’s Nest Books. Their work sal(i)vation was published in FDBN…MOURNING (2023) by Sticky Fingers Publishing.
