If you die I die
Year: 2008
An invite to the new garden city of Almere - a commuter suburb for Amsterdam - brought me to the unusual Museum de Paviljoens; a building on stilts originally designed as a temporary pavilion for Documenta IX. It was relocated to Almere in 1994.
The raised nature of the building offers perfect refuge for the more confident children of the nearby school to escape and drink and smoke joints and generally do what kids do. Going about their business they readily created all manner of litter - discarded beer cans, fast food packaging, sweet wrappers, cigarette packets, empty weed bags and plenty more besides. This litter became the focus of a project that responded to the trace behaviour of these regular yet unofficial visitors to the museum.
All the litter below the museum was catalogued and marked as to its location. I then arranged for brand new items of whatever was found to be placed in the corresponding space on the floor inside the museum.
Over the duration of the exhibiton the litter was monitored. As litter accumulated outside, so items were added inside. When litter was removed by city cleaners outside, so corresponding items were removed from the exhibition inside.
Images supplied courtesy of Marjolijn Dijkman.