Arte Povere

But it has its positive side. The ability to use anything that happens by. One sees men walking about, always on the street, with the strangest things, bits of wood, a single bit of wood that anywhere else would have returned to the invisible, the indistinguishable. Here it becomes the fraction of a fence. Fences are works of art intended to compensate for their own ferocity. They can be high, to ensure privacy, high to ensure security. They are decorated to serve as signs, or decorated as an act of connection. The round disks of oil drums, rusting away, but making a fence which is beautiful. Old wheels, bicycle wheels with spokes, fitted into a wire fence. Why bother? Because it is there. The Caribbean thrives on the discarded: an Arte Povere. Commerce is framed and exhibited on structures which are gathered together in an eternal rehearsal of the beginnings of architecture. That eternal rehearsal can even prove the argument of Laugier. See the market stalls: Greek street in Falmouth, easy structures planned according to an efficient geometry of control: the control of ownership and exchange of property. They are structures that exist by virtue of the existence of flotsam and jetsam. In their recycling of the discarded, they become beautiful. Everything has the potential to become beautiful, if it can be seen as good.