Monument

2020

photography, cockroach feces

As part of the project May I Come to Your Home to Catch Insects*, I collected cockroaches that had been removed from people’s homes and brought them back to the laboratory, where I kept them in a controlled environment.

I fed the cockroaches clothing, pages from books, and food. These everyday materials carried traces of human use, written information, and eating habits. After being consumed and digested by the cockroaches, they were transformed into tiny pieces of excrement. I used a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to image the feces and enlarged the resulting images.

At the microscopic scale, these small and otherwise inconspicuous droppings take on forms resembling meteorites, planets, or fragments of ancient steles. The information once attached to the clothing, book pages, and food can no longer be recognized. Having passed through the bodies of the cockroaches, these materials are broken down and reconstituted, remaining in a form that is difficult for humans to read again.

*May I Come to Your Home to Catch Insects：Since 2021, I have visited nearly one hundred households, working together with residents to find, observe, and identify the insects living inside their homes.

These small creatures, often overlooked or driven away, reveal another layer of familiar domestic spaces: human habits, the built environment, and insects together form a small, constantly changing ecology. The insects also became a way for me to encounter different households and the people who live in them.