Ilya Kabakov

from "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"

A Dump

The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, and inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. In this refuse of an enourmous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its entire past. Theis whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections and fragments of culture: either some kind of book, or a sea of magazines with photographs and texts, or things once used by someone ... An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials and sacks; all forms of packaging which were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it ... And this feeling of a unity of all of that past life, and at the same time this feeling of the separateness of its components, gives birth to an image ... It's hard to say what kind of image this is ... maybe an image of some sort of camp where everything is doomed to perish but still struggles to live; maybe it's an image of a certain civilization slowly sinking under the pressure of unknown cataclysms, but in which nevertheless some sort of events are taking place. The feeling of vast, cosmic existence encompasses a person at these dumps; this is by no means a feeling of neglect, of the perishing of life, but just the opposite - a feeling of its return, a full circle, because as long as memory exists that's how long everything connected to life will live.