Outside the closed narratives and beyond the frame of the books used to build the planter, I read with Norman Bryson in Looking at the Overlooked – a book I frequently open to pages about ‘rhopography’, which he distinguishes from ‘megalography’: Megalography is the depiction of those things in the world which are great – the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of history. Rhopography (from rhopos , trivial objects, small wares, trifles) is the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ overlooks … The concept of importance can arise only by separating itself from what it declares as trivial and insignificant;‘importance’ generates ‘waste’, what is sometimes preterite, that which is excluded or passed over. 1 As I try to write this piece while most of the household is out of the house, I break to mop the floors of dirt tracked in by kids and dogs, noticing the traces and the ability of dirt to be imprinted on, in and through.
Barbara Cuerden
Dirt Bank, 1990. Dirt samples collected by travelling friends and acquaintances, with their stories about the dirt transcribed (some are below) and hung in file folders from the medicine cabinet towel bar.
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