Throwaway Remarks ~ BURY IS A FOUR LETTER WORD
A tender, playful and deliberately provocative image-text commission by TNWK* for Bury's Cultural Quarter commissioned by Bury's Text Festival and animating key sites of arrival and departure around the town centre.
From 1 to 31 July 2005, 20 poster sites in the bus station and 21 rubbish bins orbitting the cultural quarter, encouraged discussions about ‘value’ in the heart of Bury’s busiest locations. The civic act of throwing something away was made a little more remarkable - even elegant or beautiful. A network of sites for double take and debate. Places normally used for casual disposal became temporary monuments to the rewards of demotic attention.
The bins formed a trail of anagram signposts to poster-sized images installed in the Bus Station. Together, these 104 image-texts built a contemporary portrait of town values. Local people asked to be photographed while TNWK were working on this project and the project evolved to include them in the bus station posters. The bins displayed letters, words and a photographic reflection of its site on all 4 sides. Full Text
TNWK focussed upon value in the context of the four-letter-word and everyday detail as lived. For example, mean - last - copy - gate and bury all play on different interpretations of value, contradicting the popular view of the four-letter-word as being simply rude or unpleasant. One buries one’s loved ones, one buries one’s treasures and one buries one’s waste.
By focusing attention upon the often ignored and undervalued street rubbish bin, TNWK were not suggesting that Bury or its people, nor their environs nor these words are rubbish, quite the opposite. Throwaway Remarks - Bury Is A Four Letter Word was a puzzle of sorts, designed to stimulate attention and conversation. The idea that something is rubbish sparks debate so one person’s scrap might be another’s treasure. Why do we keep what we keep? Why do we notice some things and not others? What attachments, preferences, habits and beliefs do these choices reveal about ‘us’?
*TNWK 1999 - 2007 was a collaborative authorship of poetic and visual practices. Kirsten Lavers and cris cheek brought specialist histories in poetry, site-specific installation and situated cultural practice; their common grounds included performance, bookworks, photography, video and curatorial intervention. TNWK’s work focussed on conversation and participation, to produce ‘portraits of value’ (exploring tensions between the societal, the communal and the political), using a diversity rather than a singularity of modes and media.