The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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zooming out in the morning and he moves it all back much more sluggishly
in the evening, like packing a suitcase. Every day a percentage gets left out—
which I often photograph—of failure, the invalids, the three-legged beds. My
children come down here if they want a 13-amp plug and chop it off the lame
fridge with a Stanley knife.
JK: This is an extraordinary arrangement of objects on the pavement!
RW: The interesting thing is about how you make an organization out of
these disparate parts; we’re looking at the moment at maybe basins from a
builder who had gone bankrupt, weights from a weightlifter, school chairs,
fridges, cookers, desks, hoovers [vacuum cleaners], old electric typewriters,
all of these things which actually you can name but would never be found in
that order domestically. Here there’s a kind of battle to make sense of them.
There are periods when he has a few boxes which he designates as the
“flawed” goods and then suddenly somebody will turn up and buy the whole
lot, and then for a while there’ll be a chaotic period when it’s all in bins. So
it hasn’t got a finite form. And if you ask Neville why he does it he’ll tell you
he does it for people’s pleasure; he loves the theater of it, he’s quite open
about that. It sustains him in some way.