MONUMENTS

Threading through all of our ‘occurrences’ to date is a weighing and questioning of value. We’ve recently begun to notice and record digitally everyday traces, remnants and markings of ‘the commons’, proposing them as monuments (literally as the dictionary defines – reminders of people and events), suggesting them as having recuperative value and resisting their easy dismissal as eyesores, irritants, undesirable, illegal etc.

This web page contains a small selection of research images that indicate the range of what we might consider to be a things not worth keeping ‘monument’ – these include:

the annually refreshed shrine of flowers and poems at the scene of an accident, the functional appropriation of a space in order to meet the storage needs of someone living on the streets, the playful or perhaps accidental sculptural serendipity of the footprint or styrofoam cup in wet cement, the consensual subversion of pedestrian pathway design, the urgent impulse to express an opinion or convey a message, the possibility for beauty in a plastic bag caught in the branches of a tree.