acousticspace

one of the most exciting projects i ever didn’t do was called things and it comprised implanting strange and lovely objects into people’s living spaces. things had started with a mildly difficult situation couple of years back when i got invited to a birthday party and did not know what to get for this notallthatclose friend. on the way to the party i stopped at  a flea market to look for a gift and in the end escaped to humor, buying her a coffee cup which had the oddest shape, cut into half vertically, with one side round and the other flat, with which i got embarrased afterwards and left on her kitchen counter, among other coffee cups, without telling anyone.

inspired by the amusing experience of the coffee cup i started hunting more odd and lovely objects and planned more implants (with the idea of documenting this obscure gift-giving practice, eventually turning it into a project) but when i grew less of a gregarious animal in time, i stopped my (mostly failed, anyway, for the lovely objects were too noticable and i never had a good opportunity to hide them properly) attempts  and things got forgotten. and i have to admit i got quite attached to some of those things as time went by, to those stayed with me. but that is the essential question of gift-giving (however obscure it may be) in the historical sense, is it not? what are the things we watch and fondle, like, as marcel mauss tells us, our ’archaic’ relatives did? what are the things now we find hardest to part with? what is that power in things today that makes us love them? what do we give to other people, what do we take from them (which shall be another project)? had i resumed implant activities, it seems now, these questions might be, intuitively, answered.