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Rubbish is used up and discarded, rubbish is never thought of again, rubbish is dirty, rubbish is obsolete, rubbish does not need to be seen, and we don’t want to see it anyway. In every space, there is a bin. But that bin is also the symbolic container that divides the past from the present. This area separates the useful from the useless, from a speculative future becoming invisible of material and things. What are we throwing away at the moment we discard something? When we stare in silence at rubbish, what are we seeing? For this series of photographs, Qianwen invited participants in the same community to share their rubbish bags. She displayed the content and form arrangements, referring to the tradition of photographing artefacts and archival material. The photographs leave the viewer to stop and linger: what if these discarded items were our most accurate common archives?
