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When I finally returned to retrieve my things after lockdown the shop assistant said, “Yes, yes, I remember.” Another proudly pointed to an email on his phone. “They sent it to all the students.” Not me, though. “Eight bins of stuff we tossed!”

I spent two years on the lookout for choice tiles in the large dumpsters outside of apartment buildings being renovated. In many cases the tiles had been hidden from view for decades by wood —or even cheap vinyl— flooring, revealed only for the span of time it took the workers to haul them out to the bin. Those tiles with bits of flooring stuck to them are the ones I miss most.

It took me many months to arrive at an elegant way of displaying the tiles front and back. I finally decided on hanging them using brass door hinges, and then carried a chisel around in my backpack for weeks. The hinges were so heavily painted over it was impossible to unscrew them. They had to be pried off, which was not easy either. It worked best when the wood was wet after several days of rain. The wet wood relinquished the screws with little resistance.

I always felt there was a performative aspect to this; allowing myself to be confused with the scrap-metal pickers, in my own neighborhood. One can only hope their fine garments and dashing coiffe might mark the difference. Still, it made me nervous, and it was slow going; I had wanted to hang some twenty tiles initially, so that meant forty hinges. After gathering about a dozen myself, I ended up buying the rest off a man I saw sifting through the garbage for scrap metal. He was very kind, about my age. Wore shorts in cold weather.

In January 2020 I had to leave my studio, for reasons unrelated to Covid, which still felt like someone else’s problem. Eventually, I ended up moving all the tiles and other materials to the Universidad Complutense, where I am a PhD student. The very day I finished attaching the hinges to the tiles they announced the university would be closing for two weeks —wishful thinking! Some things fit in my locker, the rest I left on the common shelves in the shop.


The pieces with the tiles were all about memory. Right as it was about to disappear, I wanted to retrieve a fragment of the visual culture of people’s homes, from a time when this culture was still produced locally, and, though industrial, still retained a great deal of human intervention. But I only managed to hold them in limbo for a bit longer. The pull of the dump was much too strong.