Earth Day Alchemy: Public Relations
pages of a discarded book still have story
Trashing | Journal notes:
Sensitive displays of other people’s trash documented with an iPhone camera. The compositional ease of bringing together randomly distinct histories, baggie after baggie after baggie each with the lower right corner twisted off. Impossible storylines converge. Shiny inner foil of salty snack bags gently dulled by the elements. The implacable sense, and senselessness, of other people’s trash become pragmatic then precious. A Cheetos bag freshly torn by hands or wind. Bright, cheerful colors that enhance flavor embody a sense of self-determination.
Toward the end of Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of building, he writes, “. . . we assume that when we repair something, we are essentially trying to get it back to its original state. This kind of repair is patching, conservative, static. But in this new use of the word repair, we assume, instead, that every entity is changing constantly: and that at every moment we use the defects of the present state as the starting point for the definition of the new state.”