“Here is the debris of capitalist waste, the unspectacular afterlives of discarded things.”
Lesley Stern in Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2017)
The Afterlives of Things is a research-creation project that explores the practices and affects of secondhand through experimental ethnography and bookmaking. It begins after the supposed end of the consumption process, turning to the places where once-discarded objects find themselves recommoditized: Secondhand markets. These are sites with overwhelming masses of stuff. They’re also sites of rich histories, energies, and cultural activity. What stories can we tell about the life of objects in consumer culture—how their meanings, value, and affects circulate—through secondhand markets?
“For [Walter] Benjamin, cultural debris in the form of the obsolete, the outmoded, and the discarded opens up a process of historical reflection that runs counter to the linear narrative of modernist progress. [It] is not simply a case of fetishising the past, but often represents a more complex engagement with how history functions in the present.”
Kim Knowles in Locating Vintage (2015)
On November 5th, 2022 I visited two sites, a yard sale and The Little Shop, where I collected photographs, videos, fieldnotes, reflections, interviews, and objects. Composed of these materials, the stories of each site form a photo album and a scrapbook. The books were presented at the Objets Trouvés symposium in December 2022.
Yard Sale Photo Album
The Little Shop Scrapbook
At the Objets Trouvés Symposium
