Browsing by Author "Coyotzi Borja, Andrea"

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In the Middle of Things : On Researching the Infraordinary
(2024) Coyotzi Borja, Andrea
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
The infraordinary is a phenomenon first addressed by Georges Perec in his 1975 text Approaches to what? The in-fraordinary is presented in Perec’s text as an awareness and a questioning of things and events happening in our everyday life. These everyday happenings are not qualified as grandiose; but rather, the phenomenon focuses on the significance of the banal, the common, the things we label as ordinary due to their relationship with functionality or their recurrence in our daily lives. Through his work, Perec invites us to question the ordinary, what we encounter in our everyday lives, objects, situations, routines, and things which we have lost contact with when we dismiss them or qualify them as obvious. In this dissertation, I propose the question What is the infraordinary? not as an interrogative subject, but rather to raise the possibility and purposeful search, and re-search, of the phenomenon. This questioning delves into the processes through which the phenomenon becomes visible and inquiries about the dynamics present in this process. This dissertation approaches the questioning in two parts. The first part, In the middle of things, is practice-based research that seeks through 114 fragments to circumvallate the infraordinary and, in the process, determine which features and characteristics of the phenomenon are visible and how. This first part engages with experimental writing with the purpose of having content and form intrinsically woven. It follows the structure of the book Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, which invites the reader to choose one of the three (or possibly more) orders to read the book. In the same way, the document In the middle of things invites the reader to decide how to engage with it: either linearly from 1 to 114, or by following a suggested order which is found at the beginning of that part, or by free association by moving at random from section to section. The research in this first part follows a way-finding methodology through a selection of concepts such as visibility, gesture, space, everyday life, and experience, among others. Additionally, In the middle of things engages with the two artistic components included in this doctoral research (the exhibition There was no thought, but a thrive for the visibility of something yet to be named in HAM gallery, and the piece What happens when nothing happens exhibited in Huuto gallery), as well as with related methodologies and practices employed by other artists and writers. The second part, On researching the infraordinary, elaborates on a framework of research on the infraordinary and on the work of Georges Perec in Literary studies and Artistic research. On researching the infraordinary also contains a formulation about the artistic research methodology employed in the section In the middle of things. Researching the infraordinary phenomenon brings forward the opportunity to observe and dwell on different facets of everyday life and to re-consider our relationship with our daily lives. In Approaches to what? Perec invites us to question our teaspoons, why? Why is questioning what is found in our pantries useful? What are our pantries saying to us? What do we encounter, and what do the things we find say about our everyday lives, our contexts, the place we live, the supermarkets, the social dynamics, and the politics of it? To inquire about the infraordinary is not an action delimited by the pursuit of an answer but an opportunity to engage with what surrounds us. A chance to take a moment, to look around and discover all that is already there speaking to us.
The multi-verse
(2018) Fakharzadeh, Farbod
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
The Multi-Verse was born out of frustrations and confusions regarding the concept of academic research in academia and sets to take the reader on a semi-personal, frantic, experimental journey through the struggle of writing a master’s thesis as an art student today. The project takes the form of a fragmentary essay drifting through factual and fictional, modern-day and historical ac-counts and events in order to depict a stream of thought born out of a struggle and destined to strand on uncharted territory in a seemingly futile loop. The fragments are gathered under four main titles: Anti-Thesis Or As we may think starts with the thought of writing a master’s thesis and continues by exploring the idea of academic research in art and the difficulties surrounding it in parallel to a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush which had a major role in the way computers and HTML were de-veloped in the following years. A Tale of a Thousand and One Nights Or The Unfortunate Life of Al-Mu’tasim reflects on the importance and innate possibilities that exist in archives as tools of knowledge production by de-picting the life of a man in 9th century Baghdad, a contemporary to The House Of Wisdom (looked upon here as an alternative to a modern-day academia), who dreams of gathering the biggest ar-chive of stories to date. The Constant Reinterpretation Or A Requiem for Physicality explores the manner in which human mind and memory functions and the influence of computers and digitization on archives and our methods of analysis. The Multi-Verse Or Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle consists of two parralel stories. The theory of Multiverse and the shadow it casts on the way we preceive the world around us or persue research and the life of two rival physicists asociated with the development of quantom mechanics. The outcome is a collection of 175 cards containing the fragmentory essays that can be rearranged and reinterpreted and two booklets of 20 pages each that serve as a prelogue and an epilogue intended to help a prospective reader in decoding the narrative. The language and tone chosen for this project is intentionally different from the one common in the academia and places itself closer to that of fiction and popular science. Furthermore there has been a concious attempt to include and make use of peripheral, seemingly worthless trivial information and data that usually are left out of the scope of academic writing or thought. The result is an intertwined mass of arguments, questions and reflections on the topic of thinking and writing in relation to archives today.
On the infra ordinary
(2015) Coyotzi Borja, Andrea
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
The author has been working for over almost four year in the A one day project, a project that consists of doing one project every day. The one day project (involved within her artistic work) could be made in any possible medium. Hence, in the platform (www.aonedayproject.wordpress.com) one can see a variety in the way each project is performed. One can find: video as project, video as documentation, drawing, written text, spoken text, photographs as projects, photographs as documentation, and so on. These one day projects were born from a need of doing, as well as the research of what Allan Kaprow calls ‘The everyday’ within its practice in the Happenings in the 60’s. And so the whole project consists of a direct link to the questioning of this “everyday”. But what will the project be in the end? What keeps it going on after almost four years? This thesis is about research of the everyday, but not an “everyday” that has to do with a specific discipline within the art sphere. It is not the “everyday” that links itself with the art event, or the event per se. It is an everyday that links with a process that never seems to cease its movement. And an element that the author finds to be defining of its quality in being and belonging. That element is the infra-ordinary: a mechanism that dwells in the experience and not in the social visibility or the need to belong to an event (generally speaking). It is a questioning of the quotidian. A questioning of all the things that happen and that are seen to belong to the ordinary. And yet, that we seem to have contained to ourselves in our memory, making these things (situations, actions, objects, gestures, images) emerge from the everyday, from the ordinary. Making them foreign to the ordinary, and alien to the extraordinary. Making a new platform for them in the infra-ordinary. (…) Hence our approach to the city, for instance, no longer connected to traditional notions of urban geog-raphy (cadastral survey, social classes, concentration, density and other phenomena); rather, it connected to what we termed the ‘infra-ordinary’, i.e. what we do when we do nothing, what we hear when we hear nothing, what happens when nothing happens. Outside of the city nothingness can perhaps exist (…) but it certainly does not exist in the city. In the city there is never a void. There is always background noise, there is always a symptom, a sign, a scent. So we were interested precisely in those things which are the opposite of the extraordinary yet which are not the ordinary either – things which are ‘infra’. (…) The medium for this thesis is also part of the subject being researched. It is based in the need for speech and what is called as ‘the soap box’ practice. The act and practice of making a stand for speech. A place, a platform to express an idea. But the point is to make emerge that discourse from the ordinary, and those words only having place at that moment, at that place in time where they have been spoken. That is the quality that defines them, and that is the quality that defines the infra-ordinary. That is why it is important that the experience of the thesis work and its content are directly related. A relationship based on the visibility of the process. In which the author metaphorically stands on top of a soapbox to give a moment to these ideas and concepts through a speech concerning the infra-ordinary.