Monthly Statement:
August 2006
One of the things my collaborator requested that we do on our last day of meeting was to flip the mattress. This sounded simple enough. We peeled off over a dozen layers of sheets and mattress pads, meant to protect the mattress. Then she pulled out two pages and a small post it of diagrams, charting each direction and orientation the mattress was switched since it was first purchased in 1997.

I am coming to terms with the fact that the apartment will not be in the clean and clear state I had imagined at the completion of the year-long project. Through this intense collaborative process, I realize in a profound way, something I knew from the beginning: that the desire for change has to come from within and cannot be imposed by an external force, no matter how delicate. In some ways I feel defeated, or rather deflated, I had such idealistic hopes of making a tangible positive change in this individual’s physical surroundings that would carry over into all other areas of her life. The reality is the over all visual change in the apartment is minimal but possibly we have both altered by this experience.

Process:
My interest in the accumulation project began with a close individual, an obsessive hoarder, who is emerging from a decade long depression. I am the only other person who has been inside of the apartment since she moved in. The apartment is completely filled, waist-high with accumulation. There are stacks and piles of everything imaginable: unread New York Times newspapers dating back to 1997, hundreds of Penny Saver circulars, yogurt lids, and soda bottle caps. Nothing has been thrown away in years.

There are several pathways to navigate through the clutter in her apartment, though you have to move very carefully so as not to start a landslide. One path goes from the front door to the only empty chair; another goes past the refrigerator to the kitchen sink; one path leads through the hallway into the bedroom to the bed; another forks off to the bathroom. Despite all of the clutter, she is in fact a minimalist at heart, only utilizing the bare minimum in the apartment. I believe she is at point in her life when she can finally let go of all of this accumulation and move on.

Throughout the duration of the accumulation project (one year), I will visit this person in her apartment to help clear out all that she has been accumulating for years. I will collect some of the items we would otherwise discard and save them as documents of her accumulation. I will select things that are most striking by the quantity of the objects or by the nature of the objects themselves and their visual appeal.

As we work together to empty out her space, I will document the changing landscape of her apartment through photographs. The process of sifting through the clutter is like an archeological excavation: the various layers of debris correspond with different times in her past. For the two “accumulation project” exhibitions, I will show both the physical documents of the accumulation as well as the photographs of the process of de-accumulation in the apartment. This project is a social sculpture that involves the interaction between the obsessive collector and myself to create a positive change in her life and in her space through emptying the clutter she’s been accumulating for years.

My project explores the extreme case of accumulation in our disposable, consumerist society. I understand the impulse to save, reuse and recycle - however the rate of consumption of objects of planned obsolescence is significantly faster than the rate of reusing or creative ideas for reuse.