| When I was a child I was very restless. I never wanted to sleep. In order for my parents to rest, they would tie me to the bed with a rope. |  |
Melanie Bonajo
When I was a child I was very restless. I never wanted to sleep. In order for my parents to rest, they would tie me to the bed with a rope. I often escaped and ran around the house with the mattress strapped to my back. I would also run away in shopping malls. My parents kept me on a leash until I was six. They told me later that it used to be a trend back in the seventies. I found all of this out on a gloomy Sunday when I also found a photograph of myself with half a baby bed tied to my back. By that time, I was already deeply immersed in this project about the relation of things and the impossible need to create a perfect harmony with the world around us. If I look at the things maintaining my life as a condensation of material energy, I often wonder for how long I can live carefree from the benefits of their pure energy.
I wish I were more like my grandfather, who uses every single thing around him. For him, every object keeps its own value and history. This life story shows itself in the nuance of the atmosphere surrounding the thing. Nothing is ever lost or destroyed in his world. Everything is always in its right place. He never wastes anything. Nothing seems to die a natural death anymore in Western civilization. It doesn’t survive long enough for it to be able to die. Instead, a thing is dismissed and disposed of before it is broken or worn out. I don’t actually own so much stuff, although I often dream of leaving behind everything I have.
I am captivated by the notion that the world consists of stuff and that humans think that they can impose their will on to this stuff. The idea that material things need our external intelligence and energy to bring them to life and to put some sense to them is certainly suspect. Indeed, the object preserves a form of self-expression and a voice to speak for itself.
At one critical point in my life, I felt I was only moving stuff around. I transported objects as they wished from A to B and back again and to any other place they could imagine to go. My sole purpose for living was to obey the needs of my personal belongings. With stuff or belongings, I do not only mean substantial things like furniture, but also bric-a-brac, luxury items, or any article for practical use. I also respect the concreteness of immaterial elements like information, knowledge, and visual data that are enforced upon us in our daily lives. All this needs a place to be stored and maintained as content in our mind.
People cannot exist without cluttering themselves. If we do not take care we will find ourselves trapped in a world of things and leave no room for pure observation, such as the exploration of one’s mind and its own projection of reality. We lose this internal power deriving from intuition when we think too much through things and only rely on reason to control our environment. This space for silence between the object and us is necessary to follow a certain natural order that comes through our senses.
My love for objects gives me some sort of service, and is expressed purely through emotion and the dialogue I prolong with them. My dad has a very practical approach of showing his love for things. Just like my grandfather, he sees the objects as a preservation of memory, and he deeply values and appreciates their existence. But I don’t know if my car really appreciates it when I tell her I love her.
