It rattles, it crushes, it smacks.
The shredder is an obscenely public digestive tract turned inside out, guts with teeth and a ruminating stomach: incorporation, metabolization, transition. It allows us to internalize the objects at the moment of their disappearance and initiates a resorbing process of decomposition. Who decides what gets shredded? Shortly after the victory of the French Revolution, the Bureau du Triage des Titres was established. It decided which archival records were currently administratively useful, which would be important for future historiography and which needed to be destroyed immediately. In the post-revolutionary museum, the archival practice of triage will now offer a process to sort out the millions of immobilized artifacts in Europe’s crowded museums. Affirming loss grants the stored world a way to remember – also to remember the gaps and voids, all that has not been moved to the archive. To rehearse the coming emptiness, the people of Berlin will take their memorabilia to the shredder and grind them up in a collective ceremony at the HKW. The black metal band Death, Destruction & Dodos will provide the soundtrack to the European lament, the farce of loss.