GEO-LOCATION FIELD RECORDING

The same walk four times. North then South.
An empty flower pot sits beside the footpath, sentinel under a street tree. The terracotta base is missing, grass grows through its centre.
I find and photograph three notes on ripped sheets of paper:
“usic creativity workshop”; bold, italic, times new roman.
“until the day is gon”; a kitschy script font.
“no mangiare stamattina”; no eating this morning, handwritten.
Four photos of the flower pot. Four weeks later it sits in pieces, no ring to show where it had been.
A sequence of accidental landmarks, everything is on its way.
The image is carried in my pocket, the notes read like street-signs and snippets of conversation and bits of rubbish. Focus too hard and sight is obscured by thought; everything becomes bright and flat. The flower pot has been broken for as long as I’ve known it. Orient and reorient. A month-long field recording.
I trace the walk through the geolocation filter on my phone.
The map tells me that the pot moves up and down the street slightly with each image; week two and four cross the road, week one enters a neighbouring yard.
The technological version of my narrative sways its new truth, interrupts my retelling. The mechanism intercepts, moving the objects and me with them. The pot moves, the images move, the pot stays still.
Collect the shards of terracotta. Bend down and sort through wet grass, small fragments nestled on the largest like a platter. The pot moves but my map is unaware.
I notice the notes are gone; my record of the secret markers becomes the mark. The street signs are both moving and static
At a point of accumulation and difference comes significance, and with collection comes a time-lapse. With each photo the light changes and the grass yellows. The narrative slowly appears but with too much eye contact the picture starts to blur.
Walk home and rest the pieces on my desk. Unsure of why I gathered them, I sit and work out which edges run parallel, setting them flat on the table.
There is the pot, the notes, the photographs and myself, each version disturbing the last, each is at once solitary and simultaneous. Sight is obscured by thought, the map is certain, I am not.