“[…] Gestures survive despite ourselves and despite everything. They are our own living fossils […]” Georges Didi-Huberman, Ergue-se um gesto. In: Levantes. 2017.

Two Monuments re rected

In the spirit of the French Revolution, in 1805, then French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the creation of a Lost and Found office in the bustling heart of Paris. Established with the aim of collecting lost items found across the city’s streets, the agency gathered, over its 220-years history, a vast collection of objects with varying degrees of functionality, quality – some nostalgic by now – and unlikeliness. Curiously, out of this almost trivial intent, emerged a true monument to the modern, ordinary individual, personified in the lost stories of their belongings. Thus, we see the crystallization of a snapshot depicting a histo...