Sporen

The bed of the waterway is a fervent and patient collector. It gathers, unseen, the things that humans, animals and plants leave behind. Autumn leaves. An empty wine bottle at the end of a summer day. An earring lost while kayaking. A catalogue of ecological processes, illegal dumping, quiet loss; all traces united in the dark, soft blanket of silt.

The bed is excavated. In its entirety, without hierarchy, one resource is not considered more important than another. Excavated? Perhaps rather archaeologised. Musealised. Extracted and made visible. Captured within a panel. Fixed. And then tilted. A palimpsest full of stories, wrinkled and marked by speaking scars, like the skin of a grandparent. Sunlight brushes across the bas-relief. Somewhere, someone drops a coin into the water.