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ContentSomeday a friend of mine, a junk dealer, told me about an old man, who collects every usable item in the streets of Düsseldorf and who lives in an old container that doesn't even have a window or electricity. At christmas time the junk dealer had once invited him to celebrate Christmas with him and his family. But Scrapyard-Willi said: "No, I don´t have time. I have to go to the shore and feed the rats. " He drives his tractor through the pedestrian zone, breaks glass, feeds rats and does what he wants: that's Scrapyard-Willi. His nickname comes from the time when he picked up old car seats from junk dealers and burned them at the shore of the Rhein. The metal leftovers he sold back to the junk dealers. His home is an old wooden container with nailed up windows and without electricity. It was put down on an old decayed junkyard in a district which most Düsseldorfers never visit.
Only at night Willi goes back to this place to sleep a bit. During the day he does what he has been doing since World War II. Back then, as one of the privileged owners of a handcart, he started to search the debris for everything he could sell or trade. The things he collects or sells have largely remained the same. Only the places where to find them have changed. Nowadays there are no bomb-attacks to help him retrieve the little treasures, it is the deterioration of poetry within the human mind that delivers the goods into Willi's hands: perfectly usable objects, disrespectfully abandoned in favor of the shiny new version. Festivals
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These
empty streets of cobblestone, the walls of brick and the wooden fences
with tattered posters, the dumps, the goods stations, the cable car depots,
the junkyards and material recycling allows him to back out of the
state-run system of accommodation, assurance and order. Here he can create
his life in the way he wants to, with as much autonomy as is possible
within the structure of an organised state, that organisation always
having been restriction and restraint to him.