February’s insignificants are a collection of lithics I found by chance during an excavation in 1998 as a young archaeology student. I was excavating a one-by-one metre square in a cave in South Africa, in a stratum dating back some 25.000 years. Hence the title of exhibition: 25000BP / AD1998. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, and I certainly didn’t look for tiny bits of chipped stone. The pieces were so small I didn’t notice them, until I took my bucket of dirt to the sieve outside the cave, whereupon these small fragments presented themselves to me.

What was even more telling about these objects is that the director of the excavation offered me to keep the stones, take them with me home as a kind of souvenir, since the research team had no use for them, being too insignificant. – Whether this was the term she used, I’m not entirely sure.