This image is of Rue de Sebastopol in paris. I dumped someone elses objects and watched as people took things from the pile.
Agnes Varda in her film The Gleaners and I documents the french tradition of gleaning. In wine regions of France, where a limited number of grapes must be used to classify wine, the leftover grapes are cut off and left on the ground; birds, wild boars and human gleaners pick them up. These fallen grapes ar called ‘conscripts’. Benjamin describes a collector as a prince who rescues a beautiful girl; perhaps Litnianski can be seen in this light as a saviour in possession of these objects.
In an interview with Raw Vision magazine in 1994, Litnianski said he chose shells firstly because they are beautiful and secondly he had never been to the sea. All of the objects in his garden were, he said, shells.
Benjamin again on interior trace remarks
The original way of living was not in a house, but in a shell that carried the imprint of its inhabitants
