On the morning of the very first exhibition opening in the Insignificants series, I found a black paper bag with orange fabric straps hanging by the door to my office. Opening the bag, I found a rather strange collection of things (listen in the bookmark below). The donor of this gift remained anonymous, and I had no idea who might have been so kind as to provide me with this little surprise.

I was perplexed about this gift, and was wondering how to reciprocate. Naturally, I looked to Marcel Mauss for advise on how to reciprocate strange gifts from anonymous donors, but to no avail. All I could do was to speculate, and I quickly started imagining that the objects making up the gift were a random collection, produced by coincidence. This led me to contemplate the extent to which archaeologists, especially, are capable of attributing meaning, function or purpose to virtually everything. It seems that it is particularly difficult to accept coincidence and chance as causal agents.