Softstage

it takes 2,000 days for a child’s brain to learn to read

When I moved into this Brooklyn apartment three years ago I placed an old Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (9^th edition) on a slab of stone in the backyard, and opened it to the word “language.” It’s been lying there for 4, 412 days, decaying. I photograph it once a month to document this process. The tension between organicity—in this case, decaying matter (which falls apart in time) and a constructed system of representation is what interests me. After I year I noticed—and documented—a squirrel in my backyard hopping up onto the dictionary, tearing off words, stuffing them into his mouth, and carrying the words up into a large catalpa tree, where he stashes the words in small nooks and cracks in the bark. He’s saving, of course, nesting material, but I also like to think of him as my Editor. Our Editor. He’s editing our language. And he’s also our Recycler. He’s returning the tree to itself.

-Christian Hawkey via Notnostrums

“I start every collection with one word,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I can never remember where this one word came from. I never start a collection with some historical, social, cultural or any other concrete reference or memory. After I find the word, I then do not develop it in any logical way. I deliberately avoid any order to the thought process after finding the word and instead think about the opposite of the word, or something different to it, or behind it.”