Participatory Works: Completion is Marked by Leaving a Trace

Design a public artwork that arrives incomplete and is finished by the public over time. Show a large wall-like structure some twenty metres long and three high standing free on a plaza, its surface a dense grid of thousands of small square recesses, each about eighty millimetres, arranged with mathematical regularity across the entire face. Detail the state of completion as partial and uneven: perhaps two thirds of the recesses now filled by members of the public with small tiles they have made or objects they have left — painted ceramic squares, photographs behind glass, pressed flowers, handwritten notes, a child's drawing — while the remaining third stand empty as dark voids. Show the filled areas as clustered rather than evenly spread, densest at comfortable reaching height around one and a half metres and thinning toward the top and the far ends, so the pattern records how bodies actually use the wall. Detail the individual contributions as genuinely varied in quality and care, some meticulous, some crude, none curated. Show two people at the wall, one placing something, one reading. Detail the structure itself as plain pale concrete. Set it on a civic plaza. Show even overcast light. Photorealistic, accumulated, grey grid dense with small colour, eye-level three-quarter view.