ABSTRACT
Between 2016 and 2019, we visited Holmegaard Glassworks, Denmark, at a time when the factory was discontinued as an active glassworks and before it was converted into a culture-historical museum. In this chapter, we recollect our encounters with things in the former glassworks through our photographic archives, revisiting shared as well as individual experiences. Our exchange of images, depicting things encountered years ago, has led us to discuss the recent favouring of the ‘force’, ‘vitality’ and ‘agency’ of objects as the exclusive focus of New Materialisms and related agendas. Complementing these studies, we explore an attitude to things that does not aim in one direction exclusively, and we ask instead how we begin noticing things in the first place, including things that are not privileged with taking effect or being vibrant, things that pass into oblivion only to be recollected incidentally. Although notions of ‘agency’ and the ‘force’ of things are necessary object-orientations, we argue these concerns must be supplemented by an attentiveness to idle things that only show themselves in passing or that are sustainable by enduring in the realm of the insignificant and the traceless.
