During one year working and living, I tried to not throw anything away. From November 2014 till November 2015 I kept all my life traces, all my material and digital “trash” – from spam emails to worn-out underwear or bad ideas. I considered every thing as some thing. At times I felt very rich because there were so many things. At other times I felt like I was drowning in things. At some point I thought I’d better sit still on a chair and not move, to be sure not to produce anything. Slowly I started to understand that I would need to take a different ethical stance towards “my” “refuse”, that my “waste” and me are interconnected and part of the interconnectedness of things in the world, and that I would have to listen to what all these things were telling me and what they were calling for rather than imposing any kind of rational order on them. One of the outcomes of this process is the two and a half-hour long stage performance Oblivion.
Imagine a place where you would find yourself reconnected to everything you had discarded, deleted or thrown away. Objects, thoughts, relations, you had already cut yourself loose from and forgotten about, now they all re-appear. They are yours; you care about them. You reverse, re-value, reinvest. Every thing is worth something. When does your trash stop being your trash? Think an inverse world, for instance that scene in Bunuel’s The Phantom Of Liberty where hosts and guests shit together around the dinner table and eat alone in the toilet.
Oblivion is a trip through a plentiful horizontal plane of things, carefully embracing it all, cruising between abundance and destruction. Like nature it doesn’t discriminate between what’s valuable or worthless. The network prevails over the entity, what is usually invisible becomes visible – a slow celebration of things unhidden.