HAUNTED ARTIFACTS OR GARBAGE?

          Through various findings during urban exploration, objects can come across traveling and either be viewed as garbage amongst the landscape or artifacts that represent the space, time, and history. Urban explorers can come across sites and immediately start “defining garbage broadly as subsuming themes of ruin, remains, discard, decay, hygiene, dirt, and disease” (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). However, an urban explorer can also continue to perceive and understand the connection or “intimacy here in the material artifact and its testimony to an everyday event that became historical” (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). Through analyzing and finding artifacts as garbage or items to keep, it can either be decided “of value and choice: it is profoundly archaeological, relating to the systems of classification at the core of museology. (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). There was also emphasis in research that suggested while undergoing urban exploration that there is “irony and conundrum of contemporary garbage—its ubiquity is denied, ignored and misunderstood, or simply constitutes an embarrassment and a problem” (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). From different industrial practices and historical grounds, it can represent garbage as artifacts, allow them to be viewed as value of material possession and aspects of production, consumption, decay, and manufacturing processes” (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). Through awareness, information, and acknowledgement of artifacts that can be symbolic, represent history, or carry a haunting presence within, urban explorers’ decision to hold artifacts “undermines the categorical separation of garbage from other aspects of the production, exchange, consumption, and discard of goods” (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). Overall, the general economy of explorers can determine what is a historical souvenir or what should be thrown away and removed, it can bring debate to what is found to be culturally archived or a presence that is useless/ not of value to modern society values and practices.