On the infra ordinary

Abstract

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.