Whilst researching various artworks created from junk I came across Joshua Sofaer’s latest project, The Rubbish Collection, an installation piece curated from one month’s worth of rubbish from the Science Museum’s waste. The rubbish is no longer seen as waste once placed as part of an installation piece, thus highlighting to the audience that ‘the things we throw away do not disappear but are transformed’ (Sofaer, 2014). Sofaer clarifies, ‘museums generally display items that have some special status, that are rare, or valubable. But in this project, I want to give the ‘museum treatment’ to the stuff it would normally throw away’ (Sofaer, 2014). Insofar, in placing items of which appear to have no intrinsic value in a gallery a spectator is forced to see how the objects are transformed into a piece of art.
Whilst collecting abandoned objects for our piece, Mapping the Lost City, has forced us to explore the idea that all objects at one point were valued. At one point in time, someone desired these items enough to pay for them, so why are they lost?