If thought originates in the mouth, art is born in the street.

The vestiges of contemporary cities’ time are the chewed

and trampled gums on the public ground. The old stone

ruins have become modern plastic deformities that no
one pays attention to, but everyone has owned at some
point in a borderline exercise of palate, saliva, and molar.
The gum on the sidewalk acts as the scab covering a
wound: the wound of time, fossilized in the urban spit.
Gum is the contemporary sediment, the disaster before
which we must imagine everything that existed around
it to understand it. To dematerialize the gum is to let it
be and to discover, in its raw and grotesque nakedness,

our own.

As gleaners, we continue with that gesture that has
not changed in our society of abundance: bending
down and gathering. From below, the dialectic of what
has always endured but has never been preserved is
better understood. Something that takes years to degrade
can become fragile in just a few days, transitioning from
elastic to static. The flexibility of gum is also its vulnerability,
and ours, despite its durability over time. It is therefore
in the relic of the gum that we will find the testimony
justifying the existence of something far beyond itself,
beyond ourselves. Collecting, in this sense, is to point
out an absence.