Smashed glass on the street. Blends of nondescript artifacts, soiled or iridescent. An element of Duchampian chance, externally-imposed control.
If I’d had several more weeks or months to observe Berlin, my next undertaking would have been to photograph the mixed piles of miscellaneous junk found around the city. The junk is not foul and cockroach-ridden like New York trash heaps, nor is the junk comprised of discarded plastic squashed into matted brown grass along a suburban American highway. The Berlin junk is original, complex, inspiring, and it speaks to the nature of the city. It begs you to wonder how it got there and where it came from.
I came across this particular junk pile on Weichselstraße, somewhere between Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Its mixture of assorted glass shards, scrunched up cloth, cigarette butts, leaves and sticks, and white paint splatters, all covering a thick foundation of street filth, struck me as the perfect chance assemblage. It looked straight out of Eraserhead. Did someone come along and smash a window on top of the pile? Was the glass smashed already, then placed in a bag, where it ripped through the bag and fell out onto the already existing junk pile? Who left it there and why? I remembered the junk pile I encountered outside of the Groove office building on my first day as an intern—that one contained mainly dirt, a few shattered beer bottles, and soiled clothing. It gradually decomposed as its contents were picked up or washed away by the rain.
What happened to this pile? Did someone clean it up, having decided glass shouldn’t be left on the street for children and dogs to step on? Was it left alone to gradually merge with the streetscape? Did passersby like me take small pleasure in noticing it, in assessing its contents?
Something about these piles feels reminiscent of immediate post-Mauerfall Berlin—its dilapidated buildings with peeling facades and crumbling brick, left to be squatted and salvaged or to decompose like these piles. It’s as though now, amid the city’s thirty-year-long expansion and sterilization, its junk piles have shrunk down to these avoidable, yet persistent reminders of what once was, by chance, Berlin.
And now the city speaks: the piles were never junk, at all.
