A quote from Richard Sennett (1980) Authority.
Although Sennett is talking about human nature and experience through time, arguably, Sennett is also expressing how humans are intertwined with their surroundings, that ‘change’ is also a binding of human with non-human.
Investigating what acts of ‘collect’ and ‘purge’ are, and what they mean in terms of activity, space and interactions (why are they important? why collecting and purging?), they initially were indications of human activity in spaces (the secret collector) but are also beginning to raise other thoughts; namely the agency of a ‘thing’, object, non-human and how it’s presence in a space can transform a space suddenly. In this way the acts of collect and purge (ways that humans interact with ‘things’), could also be understood as acts of transformation – or change. If collecting was thought of as the arrival of ‘beings’ in space, and purge as the leaving of ‘beings’ in space – this is a way of recognising that change is always happening (beings/things always coming and going), that space is changed by acts like these. How much a space accommodates (or maybe doesn’t accommodate) acts of change such as these will be further investigated.
Reference
Sennett, R. (1980). Authority. U.S.A, New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.
Infrastructures of Autonomy 