This publication accompanies the exhibition Flowers of Our Lives — a project inaugurating the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń. Theoretical essays on collectors, collections and collecting, extensive documentation of the exhibition as well as notes on the artists participating in the project offer a wide range of perspective on the phenomenon of collecting.

The book, as well as the preceding exhibition, addresses the phenomenon of collecting presented from sociological and psychological perspectives. Analysing private stories as well as collectors and artists’ struggles with the infinity of matter, the project focuses on amateur collections unrelated to art; it is about fetishism, desire and obsession. The exhibition also examines some contemporary artistic, collection-related practices that concentrate on ‚abandoned’, common and visually unattractive objects. Exhibited works demonstrate formal references to modernist traditions – assemblage, ready-mades, or collage.

The exhibition Flowers of Our Lives examines people’s motivation for collecting, for anything can be collected: objects, even worthless ones, but also fleeting experiences. In this sense, human life can be regarded as a type of collection, too. The project seeks to define the concept of collecting and find out the difference between collecting and trivial gathering. Another important question is the problem of exclusion and lack of understanding faced by passionate collectors.