Piles, mounds, evidence

temporary installations 2021

wood and metal + assorted materials in various states of process

 

”Benjamin´s  'angel' is a backward-gazing witness who sees history, not as we do as a sequence of passing events, but as an ever-accumulating pile of disasters, and who, despite wishing to, cannot go back and undo the damage because of the irresistible wind of progress blowing in his face.”

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic tales

 

It seems we have been momentarily distracted in our quest for a more sustainable lifestyle. We keep on digging up materials from the earth, stockpiling minerals, lumber, stone, sand, clay, ore and roots to further our projects to keep building an affluent society that can match an insatiable need to have more things at our disposal; to have them delivered right up to our front door and hauled off to storage facilities when our belongings outgrow the houses we live in; storage facilities that offer an easy solution when we find that this space, too, gets too cramped- with a single click we can choose to donate or discard the things we no longer want and have them hauled off to the garbage pile. We are the waste makers gone haywire. Our society is increasingly one of shameless extractivist practices made manifest by the slag heaps, the piles of garbage, the mounds of sludge and refuse and mountains of debris.

 

These are our monuments. These are our temples; our sacred sites and we each carry totems that readily will identify anyone among us as a true believer, acolytes in the slow procession of a lifetime of gathering, schlepping and hoarding things and services from one place to another. The piles are our legacy, our contribution to an imperfect landscape which is rapidly showing less and less signs of life.