Invent-ing

On the first Friday of the Luther College Spring term, we brought our studio practice into the public eye. Setting up an inocuous participatory performance in the campus Union, we continued our inventory and conversation on these objects, collected from the Dry Run Creek.

In our second Inventory session, we found the object from above. A relatively in tack sweatshirt which Travis took a liking to.

This object in particular, carried with it (literally) pieces of it's existence before it came to us. We can only imagine the stories of objects before they became garbage accumulating in the creek, but we know this life. Inside out, the pil collected muddy water, began to grow algae, to twist, bend and fold in the flow of the water as it changed from season to season, from year to year, protected from complete decay by the freeze and thaw. This discarded belonging would have eventually deteriorated from the stress of the natural environment on the fibers. Unlike countless styrofoam and plastic pieces destined for a longer tenure in our local Creek.

While it's easy to invent a story for each object we carefully seperated and arranged for our photographic inventory, that it came from a disinterested, cruelly disrespectful individual, carelessly tossing it out the window, forcefully ejecting it from their life to the back alley creek, the ravine tracing behind the neighhour houses, about as important to worry about as doggie discard. However, this is as unfair as it is unlikely.

The majority of these pieces are lightweight, thin plastic, or aluminum (except that concrete breeze block and the muffler of course). These light items, plastic soda bottles, potato chip and chocolate bar packaging of ordinary people, with ordinary lives which ends up on the floor of cars, in the side pocket of mom's purse, accidentally tumbling out or dropped when we're thinking about something else, feels more plausible. Our ability to forget that, to question what the ramifications of one person or every resident of our Decorah and Luther College community dropping just one piece per year (what would 10,000 pieces of garbage in our rivers, creeks, parks, ponds, pastures, streets look like? per year?), and you begin to see a picture, an accumulation of carelessness, an absense of awareness to the impact of an individual is never solitary.

Discussing our process and practice with those who stopped by the public performance yesterday, our DRS team is still willing to wander and wonder, inventing and inventory-ing, as practice. Where will this conversation go next?