The First Piece Wall started today

We opened this morning at ten. By quarter past ten someone was already sitting at the table. By eleven, the First Piece Wall had its first piece.

I don't know who came in first. We weren't keeping count. We were setting up the table, checking the materials, filling the kettle. There was a moment when I turned around and someone was sitting at the corner of the table looking at the clay.

I asked if they needed anything. They said no.

An hour later, they had a clay sphere the size of a tangerine, with a surface worked using a toothpick. They wrote their name on the back — Ana — and today's date. I asked if they wanted to write a word. They wrote: "first."

We put the piece on the wall. First of how many? We don't know. Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand? The number doesn't matter. What matters is that it's there.

There was something strange and good about seeing the first piece on the wall of a room that just opened. The room was almost empty — the table, the materials, the shelves. And on the wall, a small thing made by a person who walked in by chance.

The First Piece Wall won't change. It won't be replaced by a new exhibition. It will grow, piece by piece, for as long as the room exists. By the end of a year, it will have hundreds of pieces. By the end of ten, perhaps thousands. Each one with a name and a date and sometimes a word.

Today it had one.

If you come tomorrow, you can make yours. If you come in a year, you can look for Ana's in the upper left corner.