SEVEN WAYS TO LOSE IDENTITY.
2014 .
Collection of seven Found objects Differents materials.
Description: 3 years collecting found objects that lost their identity.
Here you can find my collection of seven objects that lost their identity. What happened is that, after research or deeper analysis, some of them finally disclosed their identity – they revealed their names – but still, a special tension between anonymity and identifiability subsists.
For 5 years I have enjoyed walking around Berliner flea markets on Sunday afternoons. Such walks are mostly about floating in empty states of
mind, searching for nothing in particular except, perhaps, surprises — moments of quiet excitement on snow or under a dirty sun. This activity is about submitting thousands things to a kind of evaluation. In flea markets, the range of offered items is huge: from rusty forks to forgotten pieces of art. In this context, recognizing an object is an amusing activity made of both attraction and indifference. Perception becomes, if you are lucky, a creative game: to recognize and identify is a gentle and rewarding form of appropriation.
Most objects cannot escape this process and, in what looks like a lost fight, are bound to reflect back their identity. But some of them are stronger, some of them withhold their‚ this-is-who-I-am‘ and offer a discrete resistance: they hide their function.
Unfortunately, these often end up revealing their cheap or uninteresting nature. In very rare occasions, a complicated set of coincidences concur to enhance my private experience of an object which does not reveals its identity or its function and yet retains the capacity to be simple, mysterious, and the source of a charming tension. Even if I grab it and touch it – still I cannot win this battle. I attributed a value to each of such objects because they won. I tried to buy each one of them and generally got them for a very reasonable price (around 1-5€) – things that lose their identity are affordable. So I can now preserve them as trophies of the underdog.
