I thought this video was very strange, because it's unusual to collect chip bags, and I bet not many people do: My strange collection
The woman in this video keeps her collection of chip (UK crisp or corn chip) bags in a shoe box. She has many different kinds of chips, like special edition bags, and some that had come all the way from Mexico, which she had collected over the years. She had 175 different bags last time she counted!
I liked her collection because she is reusing something that no one else wants. It reminds me of myself, because I too love to collect things that no one else wants, but which I value.
I personally prefer things which are unvalued to things that are priceless because not many people want them, and I feel I bring a value to them by collecting them. I collect receipts from places I've been, not just the receipts of valuable things, but supermarket and small shop receipts too.
Jean Baudrillard says: "Hence the collector partakes of the sublime not by virtue of the types of things he collects ... but by virtue of his fanaticism" The System of Collecting p9
I wonder about the woman who collects chip packets. She did not seem to show a real respect for her collection, she tosses them in the air, but was she just nervous?
Baudillard says that"with the onset of puberty, the collecting impulse tends to disappear..." (ibid p 9). So, I wonder whether she is a real collector.
But, he also says "Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably oneself that one collects" P12
I have collected the receipts from places I've been- such as a memorable trip to Malta. I have receipts from my local Whole Foods market, and from a coffee shop where I took my daughter for her birthday. This was a place where I had a coffee when I first arrived in the UK.
But I also collect receipts without knowing why I collect them.
I know they bring me satisfaction of a vision from the past into my present. Baudrillard says that "the setting up of a collectionitself displaces real time" p16. But he also says "...collecting simply abolishes time." p16
Does it abolish time, or allow us to transform time, play with it, even just play?
