GOMI

The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds – from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid - Paul Auster / City of Glass

On January 1st 2010, artist Sig Waller decided to “pick one item of litter off the streets every day, for the rest of the year.” At the time Waller had no idea what she would find, and did not know that the objects would tell fragments of stories, hinting at the biographies, dreams, habits and delusions of their discarders. Waller's odd New Year’s resolution grew into a project named ’GOMI - an Almanac of the Discarded,’ a collection of the peculiar, the random and the mundane.

’GOMI’ is Japanese for trash or junk, and was inspired by a passage in William Gibson’s Burning Chrome.

Where does the GOMI stop and the world begin? GOMI is about the afterlife of commodities. It represents the sea of cast-off goods and waste, the forgotten dreams of our times. The commodity and trash are as closely linked as production and consumption, one may even describe GOMI as the ghostly apparition of the commodity, haunting our streets as an omnipresent reminder of some vague promise unredeemed - the promise of a consumerist paradise, which turns out to be a mirage.

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