Spit Shrine
吐出的祭台
Lecture Performance and Workshops, 2025
吐出的祭台是一个参与式艺术项目，在上海外滩美术馆内与周边的缝隙中发生。
口香糖在口中是清洁口气的工具，一旦越出唇齿，便转为“污秽”，如同建筑的牙垢，黏附在非应有之地。玛丽·道格拉斯说过：“污秽的本质，是物不在其位。”
然而在非现代城市的语境中，口嚼物也可以是神圣的媒介：东亚与南美女性以口嚼发酵酿造圣饮；非洲沃洛夫族用唾液承载语言灵力；蜂巢蜜由蜜蜂口嚼而成，是口腔建构的建筑母体。
吐出的祭台结合仪式，表演性讲座, 工作坊与声音艺术，在跨文化的神话民俗与都市实践之间探索“污秽”与“再生”的社会性关系与建筑潜能。当语言被咀嚼成浆，“口水仙人”从口齿显灵，穿梭于大家用口嚼物和建筑废材建筑的庙宇，为城市缝隙的精灵带去祈愿和祝福。
在此，我们重新召唤与“污秽”的关系，想象一种吐息般的建筑原型，使建构不再依赖静止的线性结构，而如发酵般在流动中温柔地转化与再生。
Spit Shrine is a participatory art project by artist duo Transparent Afternoon, unfolding in the architectural crevices of and around Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum.
When held in the mouth, chewing gum serves to freshen breath; once it crosses the lips, it becomes “filth”—architectural plaque clinging to spaces where it does not belong. As anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, “Dirt is matter out of place.”
Across cultures, however, saliva carries creative and sacred force: women’s chews ferment ritual drinks, blessings are spoken through spit, and bees build honeycomb—a primordial architecture born from the mouth.
Through a blend of lecture performance, ritual, workshops, and sound art, Spit Shrine navigates cross-cultural mythology, folklore, and urban practices to explore the political dynamics of purity and filth, reimagine filth as renewal, and reclaim the margins as sites of genesis.
As language is chewed back into a pre-linguistic pulp, the saliva god manifests within the oracle of the mouth, wandering through shrines built by participants from chewed & spat-out materials and urban debris, delivering prayers and blessings to the spirits dwelling at the city's edges.
Here, we re-summon our relationship with the "unclean", envisioning a fluid, breath-like architectural language, activated not through permanence, but through perception and action, unfolding as a process of fermentation.
In the workshops, participants shared their memories of spit and the city, and chewed gums of different eras (such as frankincense, clove, pine resin, kudzu…) alongside “pica” materials (soil, paper), and bee-spit architecture—honeycomb, to make spit candles. By combining chews with fragments of urban ruins, we invited participants to build altars and place them in the crevices around the exterior of Rockbund Art Museum, as offerings for the spirits that dwell in the margins of urban architecture.
In the lecture performance, we presented our research on gum, spit, filth, and urban marginalization, which unfolded into a docu-fictional narrative about Jia’s shamanic experience in Inner Mongolia and her encounter with an immortal living inside the temple of her mouth. To summon the Saliva God, we brought out all the spit shrines previously made by workshop participants, and began the ritual by handing out edible “Spit Sutra” along with diverse materials for the audience to make spit candles.
As we prepared and carried out the ritual, the video art version of the Spit Sutra was played in the background. Its five chapters correspond to sacred water/saliva, grains, gums, urban crevice, and rebirth, moving from archival footage of spit fermentation and folk rituals, to the work recordings Jia’s partner sent, showing him crawling through ceilings and sewer lines as a labor worker, to documentation of spit-shrine-building...along with sound art gradually intensified the atmosphere, carrying the ritual forward until the audience joined us in collective chewing, spiting and praying.