Reconnaissance 1900–1997 inaugurated a new direction in your work. The installations contain a huge accumulation of objects, some of them things we would usually throw away. As a viewer one could feel overwhelmed by a sense of history piled up – and yet it is a history that is connected to memory and loss and the formation of the self. There is a strong ambiguity about the objects. The oppressive burden of the past is celebrated and embraced. The collections of material are all history too, but then a much more private, much more intimate kind of history; a history that you can pass on to people.

This was the first installation I made that was entirely composed of objects from my personal collection. I arranged these objects into memorial piles on a black dais raised slightly off the floor. They are memorial objects because I associate them with my mother, whose brush with death after a near-fatal accident inspired the work. Because she was immobilized and would need hospital care, she could not go back to her apartment. So, I packed up her things, deciding what to keep and what to throw away. I made a system, invented categories – photos here, ornaments there, books over there. The floor was awash with piles, the largest being the miscellaneous pile: a veritable Babel. I thought, this is how a life might look through things. So much doesn't fit. The title of the work uses the dates 1900–1997, which stems from the idea that a person's memory covers something like a hundred years, because you inherit the memories of people who come before you. I understand how people might think the stuff is trash and should be thrown away. But the objects are also physical traces of time, of people's lives and social histories. They become art through becoming a collection. Critic Charlotte Bauer aptly called one of my installations ‘immortal junk’. The difficulty people seem to have in attaching value to such ordinary things has to do with the perception that redundant things should be dumped. A painting is also an object and is also redundant in a way, but most people would be loath to chuck it in the rubbish. It's about the value we ascribe to things.