For the past few years I have been photographing mounds, collections of material amassed into heaps, piles, and small hills. What I like most about these mounds is their emergent quality, the way the simple accumulation of discrete things builds up into something more than and distinct from the component parts therein, a bulk with a vitality all its own. There is a charisma to a mound, even when made of the most mundane matter: sand, gravel, other debris. It is striking to spot one out in the wild—a placid but insistent dune arising from the din of the everyday.

Part of this visual appeal comes from the form itself—under ideal conditions a mound will exhibit a pleasing radial symmetry. Every material develops its own unique slope, a collaboration between a substance’s weight, density, and friction and gravity. Dry granular objects—corn kernels or chaff—will amass into steep conical piles while soft, smooth materials like wet clay will find rest in low domes. In technical settings, engineers describe these slopes as the “angle of repose.” It’s an uncharacteristically poetic turn of phrase—as if a mound of dirt were a languorous beauty stretched across a chaise longues like Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

Mounds are adaptable and domain agnostic. Unbounded by any ecological, political, or moral constraints on their being, they can manifest anywhere and often do. Despite this omnivorous range, certain settings reoccur as hotspots. Many mounds I encounter are found in industrial milieus. They emerge and thrive at construction sites, supply depots, rail yards, and other infrastructural hubs. Teeming with activity, these areas are as tidepools, gathering and dispersing mounds in accordance with the rhythms of enterprise. Yet, mounds find more stable niches, too—an abandoned and forgotten lot, for instance, can host the same mound, undisturbed, for weeks, years, even decades.

Distributed around Berlin, and many German cities, are mounds which have stood long enough to become adored topography. Covered in turf, trees, and, during warmer months, lolling picnickers, these hills are enduring traces of past destruction. Called Trümmerbergen—rubble mountains—each is built of the debris and wreckage created by the bombing campaigns of World War II. Teufelsberg, the largest Trümmerberg, holds nearly 100 million cubic meters of detritus. Moreover, buried within its slopes are the remains of a Nazi military college, an unfinished project of fascist architect Albert Speer. Today, the mound is popular with tourists and home to wild boars.

About 600 kilometers southeast lie more mounds, older still, found around the Polish city of Krakow. The oldest of these heaps of soil have stood for centuries—their origin and purpose lost and now a matter of conjecture. A common story is that these mounds are proto-Slavic constructions, burial sites of King Krak and his children. A less common one credits the Celts, citing their arrangement in accordance with Pagan astrological geometry. Whatever the truth, the form has been folded into the modern nation’s symbolic order; to memorialize national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko the locals chose a familiar form: a monumental mound.

If the past lies latent in mounds, so does the future—new worlds in waiting. At least, this is true of the industrial mounds I find scattered around the neighborhood. These are impermanent ebbs in the flow of material from origin to application. Their temporary existence gives a glimpse into the substrate of everyday life, a peek behind the curtain. But, like prepped and portioned ingredients on a kitchen counter, these heaps of raw matter will soon be thrown together, mixed and baked into the urban landscape. Day by day, the city will steadily grow, and the mounds will steadily shrink.

Here we face an unavoidable question, just as Eubulides of Miletus first did in the 4th century BCE. As a mound begins to shrink, it should cease to be a mound—but when? As the Greek reasoned, remove one gain from a heap and the heap remains; remove another, the heap remains still; and so on and so on until you have a heap of nothing. Some argue this is a matter of semantics, a mere quirk of imprecise language. Others make a bolder claim: that this paradox means that heaps themselves are an illusion and never truly exist at all.      

"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a work by Félix González-Torres. It consists of 175 pounds of candies piled in a mound on a gallery floor—at least, it does at the outset. An accompanying sign encourages visitors to “take one,” and as they do, the pile dwindles. The initial weight is not arbitrary, it corresponds to the healthy weight of Ross, the artist's partner who died of AIDS. The heap’s erosion mirrors the man’s physical decline throughout the illness. Are visitors complicit? Or does the candy index something else; the intimate ways people linger with those they encounter.

Other artists are drawn to the mound, too. The sculptor Reiner Ruthenbeck creates stoic Aschehaufen, or ash heaps; Lynda Benglis sarcastically salutes Carl Andre with bulbous humps polyurethane foam; and Bernar Venet’s Pile of Coal lives up to its direct title. For a time, such unvarnished piles were provocative; material interventions. But quickly, the rarified space of galleries and museums became accustomed to this trick. What’s more fun is taking the art crowd’s erudite disposition outside the white cube of the institution. Look, the world is full of guerrilla artists at work and the streets are strewn with minimalist readymades. 

A favorite of these works is on the outskirts of Baltimore. You can see it from the interstate and watch it drifting past as you speed down I-95: huge mounds of powdery white. It’s road salt—the millions of tons stored here come from the Atacama desert and are used to salt streets and highways across the entire mid-Atlanatic, from New York to Richmond and as far west as Columbus. But, before being spread thin across the land, this salt arrives here to stand in vast crystalline drifts among the warehouses, an alien landscape like a lost patch of lunar surface.