Aysegül Savas

Manu and I would look through his collection of photographs, posters, old manuals, journals, and textbooks. He found them at flea markets and on the street, always with an idea of ways he would put them to use, though he never did. His true passion was collection, the accumulation of expired things, their foggy poetry.

This stuff is so cool, we always told him. You should really do something with it.

Yeah, Ravi said, I will.

This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something of them—a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product.

Still, we belonged to our own times.

I love a good day of rotting, Ravi said.

That’s what I wanted to film. The slow and leisurely rot of a day.

It hadn’t occurred to me to plant anything in the window boxes. Sometimes I bought potted flowers, which wilted in a matter of weeks. Then I would replace them with other pots, their flowers blooming, their leaves healthy, hoping naïvely each time that they would remain that way.