In Brief 1, I chose the kitchen sink in my flat as my site of observation. The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) made me think about things that are often overlooked in everyday life. During the work of first week, I continuously observed the residues left in the sink after each time washing, and I tried to recording their positions, duration, and movement.

This film encouraged me to think what is worthy of attention. Maybe “Gleaning” is not simply about collecting discarded objects, but also a way to look again at things which were considered insignificant or without value.

I think my documentation of residues is also a kind of way of “gleaning”. Rather than collecting the residues themselves, I collected traces of their appearance, movement, and disappearance. Through this process, residues shifted from waste into subjects worthy of sustained observation.

During the second week’s tutorial, Can ( my tutor) recommended The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin, 1989) to me. Le Guin‘s idea of the “carrier bag” encouraged me to reconsider how to organize my observations and hold multiple residues and relationships.

Throughout the process, as over 40 observations accumulated, I noticed that residues of different materials often shared similar behaviours, such as hiding, returning (doubling-back), dispersing, reuniting, or moving with water (parasiting). This led me to question whether the archive needed to follow a linear chronology. Instead, I began organising it through relationships between behaviours.

Though my zine still includes categories and explanations, I attempted to shift the archive from a linear record towards a narrative space that could hold different individuals, behaviours, and relationships simultaneously.

Meanwhile, staging or worldbuilding, as my methods of investigation, encouraged me to consider how observations could be presented and experienced. Through tearing, drawing, folding and layering tracing paper, I wanted readers to encounter those different residues’ behavior before explanations, allowing them to experience part of the observational process themselves.

HORG’s(n.d.) pseudo-taxonomic study of bread clips also influenced my form of writing. Their serious, almost scientific descriptions of non-living objects inspired me to write about residues in a tone somewhere between field notes and speculative taxonomy.

Finally, these investigations changed how I understood the sink itself. Rather than simply a functional space for cleaning and removing waste, I began to see it as a relational space shaped by the interactions between water, surfaces, the drain, human actions, and the most important one—residues!

References

Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG) (n.d.) Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group: Taxonomic data of the breadties of the world. Available at: https://www.horg.com/ (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Le Guin, U.K. (1989) ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, pp. 165–170.

Varda, A. (2000) The Gleaners and I [Film]. France: Ciné-Tamaris.