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Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe.
Across 294 pages, Parke gathers images from decades of work and reimagines them as a single vision: a cosmos trembling at the edge of collapse, where light flares and fades, where bodies blur and vanish, where beauty appears in the very act of disintegration. Monument is at once archive and prophecy, disappearance and arrival, a book that presses us to face the truth of what it means to be here for only a moment.
The volume itself carries this gravity. Painstakingly hand-bound in leather, marked with totemic coordinates of Earth, blind-stamped end sheets, black-sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque that, once removed, leaves the object without language.
“At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.” - Trent Parke