This month’s theme is “Accumulation: Between Archive and Excess”.
Accumulation has long been a driving force in art, literature, and culture. To accumulate is to gather, layer, and preserve—but also to risk being overwhelmed.
Artists and writers have returned to this theme again and again, fascinated by the way repetition and excess can both illuminate and obscure meaning.
When does collecting become obsession?
When does memory preservation become clutter?
How do artists navigate the line between archive and overload, ritual and compulsion, meaning and noise?
Accumulation is therefore not only an artistic strategy, but also a human one. It speaks to desire and anxiety, possession and loss, creativity and illness.
To accumulate is to leave a trace—but also to risk being buried under what we keep.
Artist: The Poetry Beast
@the_poetry_beast
https://www.facebook.com/thepoetrybeast
@thepoetrybeast
https://thepoetrybeast.bandcamp.com/
Description: Madness of Collecting visualises the psychological weight of accumulation. Encased within a sea of books, clocks, toys, and forgotten objects, the poem reflects on the feverish impulse to gather and possess. The grayscale palette evokes both memory and decay, turning ordinary detritus into a monument of human desire. The work meditates on the thin boundary between preservation and obsession—where the act of keeping becomes its own kind of burial.
Artist Statement — Accumulation
My work treats accumulation as a verb—an active choreography of holding, layering, and re-sounding the ordinary until it changes state. I’m drawn to the minor archives we build without meaning to: pockets and browsers, drawers that refuse to close, photo rolls that repeat the same sky until the sky becomes a chorus.
In poems, fragments, and micro-fiction, I try to make the overlooked item ring again—not to worship excess, but to listen inside it: a ticket stub as liturgy, a voice memo as inheritance, a jar as a temporary cathedral for air. Formally, I move between list, instruction, and narrative to mimic how memory actually behaves—looping, misfiling, returning at odd hours with perfect detail and missing dates—so that repetition becomes both engine and echo.
The pieces sit between archive and overload: less about romanticising the past than noticing the present tense hidden inside piles, feeds, and stacks. I’m interested in the thin seam where collecting becomes compulsion, where preservation turns to clutter, where meaning flickers between signal and noise.
Accumulation, for me, is less about owning things than about attention—how attention gathers, crowds, and arranges the world. The keepsake is simply where attention decided to sleep; the work is the moment it wakes and asks what must be kept, and what we must let go.
Accumulation 2 explores the haunting beauty of material excess. Against a backdrop of worn objects—books, clocks, toys—the poem drifts like a whisper of conscience, its words curved and ghostlike across the scene. The text evokes the spectral nature of ownership, suggesting that every item we keep holds a trace of ourselves. In this still life of clutter and decay, memory and matter intertwine, revealing how the act of collecting can transform both space and spirit.
Artist: Shahar Tuchner
https://www.facebook.com/TuchnerShahar/
@shahartuchner
www.shahartuchner.com
The Persil Tower – Rabota!
*(2010, manipulated readymade, 60 × 60 × 135 cm)*
"The Persil Tower – Rabota!" explores the weight of accumulation - not of possessions, but of labour, repetition, and human endurance. A janitor, confined within the rigid frame of his work, stands as both worker and sculpture, an embodied archive of gestures, exhaustion, and necessity.
The installation assembles a constellation of cleaning objects - washing powder, a plunger, a garbage bin - each element a modest instrument of order that becomes, when gathered, a monument to the invisible systems that sustain daily life. Within this fragile tower of labour, accumulation is no longer material but existential: the piling up of hours, movements, and obligations.
The work reflects on how routine can transform into entrapment, and how identity may be shaped by what one repeatedly performs. It is a quiet study of dignity and constraint, of work that both maintains and consumes.
Through its manipulated readymade structure, "The Persil Tower - Rabota!" turns accumulation into both form and subject - revealing the delicate point where the human body becomes the archive of its own persistence.
Artist: Tavarna Garvey
https://substack.com/@eyesoftavarna
Description: My work is a series of still life images of miniature photography accompanied by a short story is titled 'ONLY THE ESSENTIALS'. I was inspired by the work of Barbara Kruger to comment on my own tendency towards consumerism.
Artist: Paul Matosic
www.matosic.net
Description: Most of my work makes use of accumulated objects/materials. Usually, waste materials such as polystyrene packaging, redundant computers, hard trash, and the leftovers of consumerism. Cheap and plentiful, it speaks volumes about our disposable society. In recent work, I have continued this process using reclaimed wood offcuts to construct groups of small sculptures that can be organised and reorganised at will. In an exhibition, this becomes an inclusive democratic way of making art. You will have to look on my website to see this work.