Elie Ranu
YOUR PARCEL IS COMING | An often-overlooked aspect of urban life is the ephemeral sculptures of discarded cardboard boxes and packaging, left on sidewalks, awaiting their final journey to the garbage truck. A weekly, monthly, or even bi-monthly event in more remote areas. This work explores the sculptural forms these piles of cardboard inadvertently take, turning mundane waste into objects of contemplation. Photographed at night with a harsh frontal flash, the series strips the scene of context, removing any temptation to romanticize the subject. What remains are these temporary monuments—fleeting relics of our consumption. The choice of low-contrast black and white reinforces this approach, reducing the piles to their geometric essence, shifting the focus from function to form.
To heighten the physical presence of the work, some images are altered using materials directly linked to the act of delivery—bubble wrap, staples, labels, adhesive tape. These interventions extend the subject beyond the image, embedding the accumulation into the very fabric of its existence, making the material more tangible, more present.
Yet, this project is far from being just a visual study. These accumulations of cardboard reflect the relentless consumerism and capitalist logic embedded in contemporary life. Receiving a package, once a rare event that didn’t warrant a dedicated collection day, has now become a daily ritual for many, highlighting how drastically our consumption habits have shifted over the past two decades.
Beyond their materiality, these boxes unwittingly reveal fragments of life. Their logos, labels, and sheer quantity sketch an economic portrait of the households that left them behind. But they also expose something more intimate: there are those who neatly stack their boxes, edges cut clean, arranged with precision, and others who discard them carelessly, torn, crumpled under their own weight. A methodical or chaotic personality, careful or rushed—each leaves an unconscious mark on the pavement, shaping the work of the waste collector. Every pile is a trace, a silent imprint of the home that produced it.
This language exists only for a few hours. Boxes left out late at night vanish by morning, swallowed by the garbage truck before the city wakes. This is the essence of the series: capturing what so few notice, what exists only in a fleeting in-between—a brief moment when the city is still asleep. To photograph them is to give presence to what disappears before it is even seen.
In a world saturated with images competing for attention through intensity and spectacle, this work stands apart in its restraint. It invites us to slow down, to reflect—not only on the forms emerging from our throwaway culture but also on the deeper narratives it carries: consumption, waste, and the inadvertent self-portraits we create, without realizing it, in cardboard. www.instagram.com/elieranu
