STRATIGRAPHY: A discipline involving the description and interpretation of layered sediments and rocks, and especially their correlation and dating (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 5th edition). A kind of geological survey is undertaken in an empty New York City apartment. Within this closed domestic space, a continuous sedimentation process occurs, with each inhabitant depositing a trace of themselves on top of the traces already there, each a new layer in time, all to be covered too by those who will come next. Here, the stratified material being studied is not rock, but, instead, memory and presence.
—Anonymous