Urinotron is a large-scale installation that takes our organic waste (urine!) and transforms it into power. Contribute your urine and then put your feet up as the salts in your liquid gold turn into sustainable pee power. Urinotron combines scientific equipment, engineering skills, reels of electronic wires in an artistic equivalent of an alchemist’s workshop will be producing a different kind of gold.

Friday 15th – Sunday 17th November

  • Urinotron, Sandra and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian(FR)
    Friday 15:00 – 19:00
    Saturday 12:00 – 19:00 – with a break
    Sunday 12:00 – 14:00

The project is declined according to the contexts it is hosted. For Piksel festival, a unic workshop will be organized to build a new version of the Urinotron, collectively made and opened to improvements or inventive skills. As energy is one of the most important stakes of our society, working together around the Urinotron will offer the opportunity to think about other energetic models and why we are flushing such a valuable resource.

The general shape of the Urinotron crosses the aesthetics of alchemy, the assembly of heterogeneous elements such as glass, steel, copper, carbon, aluminium, coal and constitutes a clandestine laboratory within which are assembled tanks, electrodes, batteries, cables. This great whole can be likened to a giant microbial battery, functional and whose objective is not so much to reproduce or improve existing research in laboratories on this subject but rather, through a symbolic and artistic bias, to develop a setting criticism of the technique to test the limits and create, then, a material judgment on the industrial and capitalist context about bioenergies.

The challenges associated with the energy transition engage us to rethink our uses, our consumption patterns and industrialization in our societies. From household appliances to transportation, from the management of public lighting to the optimization of web pages (a google search would be equivalent to a boiling water pot), each gesture is the object of the calculation of its carbon footprint and its cost energy. The hyper-industrialization and the abstract nature of pollution and global warming (micro-particles, gases, spatials and elusive temporalities on an individual scale) produce a shift, a decoupling between the production of energy and its use. The growing intermediation of these circuits plays a role in the loss of consciousness of each person’s place. Yet as basic, unlimited and easily adaptable resources, renewable energies open up a resilient economic model.

The intention of this project, symbolic and concrete, points the balance of power between a dominant, centralized electricity production and a microelectricity produced by each one of us, recyclable, reusable aand sustainable. This form of resistance to this economy in tension can be found outside, also, of the exhibition context, and makes it possible to think the project with a nesting in the public space within which the installation would maintain its specificity but would be connected to common uses, useful and to rethink the public space and its uses.


Piksel19 is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway, Hordaland Kommune, Community of Madrid, Austrian Embassy, Acción Cultural Española, Inaem, Pro Helvetia and BEK.