Monthly Statement:
May 2006
During the end of May and into the first week of June I traveled through a part of Europe with my wife - a first trip for both us. We visited some really incredible places and soaked up all things older and smaller. Along the way I made great efforts to find dust bunnies and was able to obtain, literally, a handful of accumulated dust. I beat my self-imposed quota of gathering dust from two sites a month. May brought in 4 healthy-sized dust bunnies and June produced 3 dust bunnies, one of which is surely the oldest in the collection. I was a little concerned – not sure why exactly once I really think about it – about traveling with baggies of dust clumps. I hadn’t thought through how I might explain my souvenirs to a customs agent. No problems with the re-entry though, I even managed to sneak in a lone banana from Rome.

My travels and dust bunny hunting began in Paris although I had been on the lookout for dust in the airports. The first clump I pieced together came from Notre Dame. This was my first European cathedral experience so it was rather difficult to look downwards at any point, but once a little bit of dust was located on the base of a column the rest surfaced pretty easily. The flow of foot traffic slowed towards the apse while tourists and the faithful drifted towards an encased, scale model of the cathedral. It’s strange to linger in a place twice at the same time – reminded me a lot of the movie “Bettlejuice” with Michael Keaton.

The second and third dust bunnies were gathered from Saint Sulpice (of “da Vinci Code” fame) and the Palace of Versailles (decadent dust).

From France we continued on to Munich that didn’t end up bearing any fruit in my dust search. It rained a lot and my hands were full managing large-scale pretzels.

The fourth dust bunny obtained in May came from the stair well on the climb to the top of the Duomo in Florence, Italy. This was quite an ascent. The stairwell is located in between the walls of the dome itself so much of the climb is executed with one’s upper body leaning to the right at approximately the angle needed to touch the side of your knee without bending forward or bending your knees. Along the way, amidst the graffiti and humidity, I gathered little pieces of dust bunnies caught in the grills covering the ventilation holes, or windows I suppose, of the dome. Little by little the Duomo gave me a dust bunny. The reward of climbing to the top and soaking up the Florentine countryside from the air was a tight, plexiglass encased walk around the base of the Heaven and Hell fresco on the interior of the dome. Hell was so captivating.

I’ve also included some general update images. All the books I’ve made so far that house the “cloud” images of the dust bunnies from each month have become a new accumulation of its own and the dust itself is now much more of a pile than a stack.  

Process: I plan to acquire dust in two ways. Initially, I will ask for permission to sweep a chosen site and document the process. If permission is not granted or if I find myself in a place that seems to be an interesting opportunity for gathering dust, I will then obtain my accumulate in a covert fashion. This means I will inconspicuously search for dust clumps on the spot and document the site, rather than the process.

I will be gathering dust from two different places a month as my contribution to the Accumulation Project. From each bag of dust I obtain I’ll manipulate the dust bunny into different shapes and make a series of photograms on cyanotype paper. As the dust bunny assumes this new pictorial form, it takes of the appearance of a cloud in a deep blue sky and subtly forms a connection between a nuisance remainder of human existence and the ephemeral behavior of the weather overhead. Each series of “clouds” will be placed into a book that I’ve assembled specifically for that place.

Contact: sekondsight@yahoo.com