PS – Garbage

Should have mentioned it: Having been recently in Istanbul I went ….

…, well let me start the other way round. It is now a couple of years ago that I went with a group of students – MA in Youth and Community Work, which then existed at UCC [now it is all about individualist Social Work courses  and Asian studies, planned now as well as something like joined MA Iruish-Asian social work;-) – tertium non datur: no youth and now community anymore] to West Cork. One of the students, Julie, pointed somewhere at a wreck of a car, just left somewhere: masterless, meaningless, lacking real past, present and future.

Will we one day pay attention to these things, wondering around and admiring these things as we are now searching for monuments of ancient times –

she asked.

Perhaps looking at them in the way as I recently mentioned – a matter of

concretised, condensed, monumentalised history not in the position we take towards and the interpretation of – past, present and future – reality. It is the monumentalisation of peoples’ engagement and practice.

Apparently we will – and we do already:

Chinese artist Yao Lu, has photographed mounds of garbage covered in green protective nets and reworked them by computer to re-create Chinese painting aesthetics. By digitally adding pagodas, houses, boats, interesting trees onto the photos he took at these sites he produces meticulously created landscapes.

This is what the website of Istanbul Modern states on a truly fascinating work.