Why have artists employed - and why do they continue to employ - trash? Trash that has been incorporated, photographed, "treated", emphasised, camouflaged or "corrected", but which still remains trash, that is, something that belongs in a garbage can or a dump. We ourselves have been discarded or rejected by other human beings; more or less on a daily basis, we are forced to recover, scrape together and reassemble fragments of ourselves.<BR>As we look at Alberto Burri's used sacks or the details of corpses photographed in the morgue by Andres Serrano, we might recall the voice of Cathy Berberian, capable of blending fine music with "pop" music; we might listen to a composition by Paolo Castaldi; we might reread certain lists by Bohumil Hrabal or certain "frisbees" by Giulia Niccolai; we might think back to certain film sequences by Abel Ferrara or other vocal collages by Meredith Monk ... and, as we do, we might realise that twentieth-century culture is packed with recovered material, reuses and contaminations, shreds, fragments, discards and "noise".