RUPTURE

A collaborative project by Milcah Bassel and Anne Percoco

Jersey City, NJ | Fall 2024 – Fall 2025

Sidewalk cracks aren’t just signs of wear. They’re openings; tiny, persistent ruptures in the sealed skin of the city that let water and roots through. What we discard carries textures, colors, layers, and the fingerprints of commerce, craving, and carelessness. Trash is evidence of movement, use, and change; it tells stories if we’re willing to look. Japanese knotweed, vigorous, stubborn, and often feared, thrives in disturbed places. Its roots bind soil, and its shoots feed and heal. Approached with curiosity rather than horror, it becomes not a menace but a signal of a larger imbalance. Each of these elements (the crack, the trash, the weed) marks a point of contact between human systems and the wild persistence of the nonhuman world.

To capture this point of contact, we engaged in a year-long cycle of foraging, processing, and casting to create a visual and tactile archive of place. We harvested knotweed stalks from the Palisades Cliffs, collected paper trash from the West Side, and gathered seeds from the Bergen Arches. After cooking, soaking, and beating these materials into a fibrous pulp strengthened with cotton linter, we formed large sheets of paper in molds at the studio. We then transported these wet sheets to casting sites at Riverview-Fisk Park and in Greenville at Danforth and Princeton Avenues. By pressing the wet paper deep into the crevices and highlighting the fissures with contrasting colors of pulp, we engaged directly with the sidewalk.

We treat the crevice not as a void, but as a vessel actively collecting the stories of the street. The paper lines this container, lifting the physical shape of the rupture in a humble micro-gesture that acknowledges the wild agency of the nonhuman world.