While no public copy of Filth Studies 1 exists in standard libraries, descriptions from niche forums and zine reviews (circa 2023–2024) describe it as a hybrid essay-video-collage piece, roughly 47 minutes in length. The work is divided into five movements:
A history of 19th-century lunatic asylums as filth laboratories — where excrement, vomit, and unbounded bodies were managed by a clean-handed bureaucracy. Rebel Rhyder argues that asylum architecture (radial panopticons, airing courts, sluice rooms) was the first true Filth Studies curriculum. assylum 23 04 01 rebel rhyder filth studies 1 t updated
Updated Filth Studies moves beyond metaphor. It asks: what does the material detritus of an asylum do? Rhyder’s concept of the “rebel residue” argues that filth retains time. A stain is a witness. Where official records (case files, admission logs, treatment charts) present a linear, clean narrative of cure or death, the filth offers a lumpy counter-narrative. On 23.04.01, the rebel might have smeared feces on a progress note, not as madness, but as a corrective: the body’s truth against the pen’s lie. Thus, the asylum’s janitorial order is a form of archival violence. To clean is to forget. To rebel is to make a mess that cannot be easily erased. While no public copy of Filth Studies 1
A fragmented text dated April 1, 2023, written inside a former asylum turned art squat. Lines include: “Clean theory is dead theory
“Clean theory is dead theory. Let your citations rot. Cite the stain on the mattress instead.”
The core provocative term. “Filth studies” is not a recognized academic discipline, but in cultural criticism, it refers to the analysis of abjection, dirt, pornography, waste, and the grotesque (drawing from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror). This suggests the work is either:
The author details performing “dirty work” — living as a janitor in a closed psych ward, collecting waste samples, recording staff’s disgust reactions. This autoethnography blurs the line between researcher and contaminant.