Experience can be an unreliable witness, as our place in the landscape of existence is not ‘cut out’ from the whole. Memories and knowledge must be excavated either from the plane of our ideas or from some kind of material substance. Sought after in tiny traces, in barely there clues, minimal moments, construct our understanding of the world around us. Yet we barely pay any attention to them. We seem to forget that each tiny piece, minimal place and softest gesture, embody the whole at a particular nexus within it. These micro-scale instances that feel so embedded in us and our everyday experiences, fade in the background noise of everything else we seem to experience. However, our everyday lived experience owes much of its character to such sights, sounds and interactions, that constitute our life’s unique porous texture. The Infraordinary,” refers to a concept first used by Paul Virilio and Georges Perec: In the 1970s, they introduced the term l’infra-ordinaire to describe the habitual and ordinary, the opposite of the extraordinary.
These minimal gestures inform heavily our relational context and people’s engagement with the world, allowing us to consider them beyond their occupied space, where meanings are attached to the world. They rather urge us to understand that meanings are gathered from them. These ordinary instances, feel like fragmented souvenirs from times where we were more conscious of our surroundings, our experiences, our (inter)actions and behaviours. They urge us to seek meaning in almost sacred micro-experiences we tend to blur in our otherwise profane minds. As we touch upon these infra-ordinary instances, we assure ourselves of reality, of love, of things that we have formed, and they have formed us. This experience is elemental and while we are so used to reducing the infra-ordinary instances’ range, privileging our extra-ordinary interactions, we reduce their range. When did signatures become confirmation of our presence?
Shifting away our focus from all happenings that are grandiose, we reconsider everyday practices as critical for shaping us through seemingly irrelevant stimuli, forgotten subliminal information, and minimal internal forces. The infra-ordinary, as a phenomenon, brings into focus the criticality of the banal, the common, the ordinary. Standing against the noise of our everyday life’s extra-ordinary pursuit, Perec’s notion challenges the quotidian, the obvious, the habitual. Reconsidering our intra-actions and not interactions, this exhibition focuses on bringing forward agencies of observation that are interweaved with what is observed. This profound exploration of found objects, materials, gestures, actions, experiences, becomes then an ontological metaphor that interlinks the past, the present and the future. These practices thus, become world-making in themselves: they seek to change the way we witness and are witnessed. Challenging the idea that that matter and meaning pre-exist only as constituted by our intentional interaction, rather reminding us that they are co-constituted through our intra-actions.
“The Infraordinary” seeks to explore the habitual and the overlooked aspects of daily life as a means of uncovering shared human experiences and fostering community. Drawing from Paul Virilio and Georges Perec’s concept of l’infra-ordinaire, the exhibition emphasizes the ordinary as a powerful tool for socio-ecological and cultural reflection. By bringing focus to the infra-ordinary, the exhibition questions the impact of personal intimacy within broader cultural, social, political, communal and architectural contexts. The exhibition becomes an opportunity to deeply engage with what surrounds us, whether physical, mental, emotional, digital, structural, habitual, but ever so ordinary that we do not pay attention to it anymore. It is an opportunity to regain contact with everything we dismiss as obvious and re-discover all that is already speaking to us.
As our existence boils down to an unconscious rhythm, Perec’s concept turns into time, and the exhibition shed a deep look into the empirical, creating new possibilities for purposeful search, and re-search, of the phenomenon. Borrowing ideas from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the exhibition considers the infra ordinary experiences as ‘the topography of our intimate being’. A journey into intimacy neatly evoked by tiny moments and gestures, focusing on what remains unnoticed and does not seek attention to itself. These infra ordinary practices have the potential to become assembled poetic spaces.
As we collectively grapple with the aftermath of rapid global changes, climate crises, pandemics, and technological overload, the exhibition shifts focus from the grandiose to the everyday. This is a timely exploration of how the overlooked details of our routines reveal profound truths about who we are and how we live. By embracing the unremarkable, the exhibition opens space for reflection, mindfulness, and reimagining community narratives in a time of unprecedented cultural flux. Questioning how such micro-instances become both spiritual milieu and cultural images, the exhibition brings into focus authentic relating practices, that are a unique mixture of a spatial sense and psychic locations, unlocking our repositories of everyday, ordinary memories.