>> Oct 2017, Approaches to the infra-ordinary
In Barcelona for the first session of Extemporaneous Cities, coordinated by Mixité in the framework of Inter-Accions.
October 26, 2017
Sala d’Art Jove, Carrer de Calàbria, 147
Approaches to the Infra-ordinary
with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and Gabriela Navas (Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà)
“How should we take account of, question, describe, what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” —Georges Perec
Georges Perec introduced the notion of the “infra-ordinary”—as opposed to the extra-ordinary—as the daily realm that often goes unnoticed but needs to be paid attention to and interrogated. This first session of Inter-Accions starts at the smallest of scales, in an attempt to explore a city composed of the daily movements, habits, and shared experiences of its inbabitants, while understanding how those are shaped by but may also shape the built environment around them.
Combining tools and methodologies from anthropology and architecture with artistic vocabularies and approaches, Gabriela Navas and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga draw from their respective research and practices to propose different ways of looking at the diverse realities and interconnected scales of the local. The session includes a theoretical exchange and a short exercise in the surrounding public space which will form the basis for a collective discussion on the permanent tension between the planned city and the daily life of the people, as well as the latent possibilities for change in that midst.