Like Atget and the camel driver, my research is concerned with understanding the city and the topography of everyday life through lived experience and encounters at the scale of 1:1, as opposed to overall diagrammatic reductions. The city and the people inhabiting it are understood as integral parts of one organism. My work is an investigation of the spaces of the infra-ordinary, a term coined by Georges Perec to describe the ordinary and habitual aspects of everyday life, as places of coexistence and correlation in the city. 1 Through my thesis project, Eroding Permanences of the Infra-ordinary; City as Archive (2012) I produced a set of alternative maps in order to decipher and understand a part of Queens, bit by bit. These included three different versions, applying to each their own technique: 1 Accumulative: the first is a collection of found and acquired objects, assembled into ‘Ragpickers Archive of Ephemera’, which expresses the area through a narrative of objects, from old photographs and letters of residents to everyday things as tokens of (non-)events: cigarette boxes, receipts, a spare part from the auto-mechanic, chipotle peppers from the deli. 2 Aural: another kind of map was produced in the entrance of Cousins Deli: in ‘Memory Tape / Strata Recorder’, a tape recorder was altered to being cyclical (a two-minute loop), instead of the linear nature of both the tape cassette and the way we understand time. This loop captured bits and fragments of sounds, conversations and ambient noise, constantly re-writing itself, thereby becoming a map in constant transformation, as the area itself.
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Espen Lunde Neilsen
above: Memory Tape / Strata Recorder
right: Rackpickers Archive of Ephemera
1 Perec, Georges, trans. John Sturrock. ‘L’Infra-ordinaire’, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces . London and New York: Penguin Books, 1997
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