Correspondences
Mark Dion & Yoshiaki Nishino

October 1st 2002

Dear Dr.Nishino,
Thank you for the exceptionally warm hospitality Bryan Purcel and I received at your hands at the Univrsity of Tokyo Museum.

It was a great pleasure to meet a kineres spirit. You and I share the same passion and appreciation for museums and their history, as well as an astonishment with the fact that not everyone shares these feelings.

Tere are enough Museum-fanatics to keep the globe a far more interesting place.

I am confident that our numbers are growing, and increasingly there is an acceptance of the vitality of using things (specimens) as a complex transmitter of knowledge.

This ofcourse is something sculptors, curators and designers have known for some time.

Regards

M. Dion.

Field Study of insect collected in Gartow, Germany 10/1/02

October 4th 2002

Dear Mark,

Ms.Liz Gilchrist at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery kindly sent me a recent catalogue of the Tate Thames Dig Project, which will give us some sense of the editorial ideas for our project's publications.Thank you vew much for your attention.

I was very happy to meet with you and to realize that there are close similarities between our ideas and praxes. Working with you on this collaborative exhibition with such a meaningful title, MICRO-COSMOGRAPHlA, is a wonderful experience for me and also for our Museum staff.

As we discussed during the last meeting at Koishikawa,the project participants,now more than twenty members,Mr.lida,editorial staff,camera crew and l have all started with Polaroid cameras in hand, since Oct.1st,to make university campus-wide investigations into materials for the exhibition.Seven or eight hundred of photos with short descriptions willal|be gathered and dropped into your hands in a few weeks.

We have much enjoyed ourselves during this process,because we academic garbage collectors have encountered in various sites a lot of marvelous waste protected under thick dust from Kronos, destructive power-Some of them are,to my personal eyes,authentic " objets trotJV6f.More dusty,more fascinating.Waste,please!This IS how we are now fighting our collecting battles.

We all are looking forward to hearing from you- Best wishes,

Sincerely yours-Yoshlaid NlSHINO