This week was entitled 'Archival interventions', and included a documentary by Grayson Perry and the short story 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away' by Ilya Kabakov.
I found the book really interesting, and it made me rethink hoarding behaviours.
Many years ago, I worked for Guinness World Records and it was my job to respond to the general public who had attempted to break the records. A big part of this task was responding to people who were collecting things. They would send in photographs of their collections, that had slowly absorbed their houses. Teapots on every surface, clocks (so many clocks!) wall to wall, porcelain dolls lined up along shelves and over beds. The collections always depressed me a bit, as no one person has any need for 100 different types of anything. It always seemed wasteful and oppressive at the same time. Similarly, whenever there's a TV programme on with the theme of hoarding, I'm always mentally emptying rooms and filling skips.
I thought the book 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away' would make me feel like this, but instead it reframed hoarding as archiving, as the man who had filled his apartment with things people ordinarily throw away had also numbered everything and wrote about how it was important. I think perhaps 'importance' and 'need' are different for everyone, and this story has made me a bit more sympathetic towards hoarding behaviours.
'Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman' showed Perry exploring the archives of the British Museum. He selected various works for a new exhibition along with making some of his own works, inspired by what he found. You can read more about it here, but what I really liked was the archives themselves. As Perry makes clear, we will never know the names of the people behind all of these crafts, but the skill of these craftspeople is impressive - as is the amount of artefacts. As someone who has a need to make things, I liked to see evidence of this need going back thousands of years in other people, and ending up in the British Museum.
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