Ode to Perec
Ode to Perec is a sort of thank you, a dedicated practice to French writer, Georges Perec. He was a lover of literature, poems and puzzles, a studier of the infra-ordinary, the human experience, and space. His work 'Species of Space and Other Pieces' explores how we as humans navigate space, how we notice space, misuse it and suggests how we can better appreciate it. I wanted to build a project around this work by Perec to reinforce the importance of observation and engagement with everyday spaces, and take his writing as a grounding basis for my work. I want this project to be an educational experience, a moment of self teaching for the user to learn how to observe what is normally ignored, and engage appropriately with the everyday. Here are some extracts from my publication:
Ode to Perec...
History feels at my heels, the distractions of my daily life stacking up like receipts in my purse. Things shine so brilliantly, the next, the better, the new. What was once mystified perhaps seems inconsequential now. Light, shadow, space, knots in wood, the way the blossom falls on the windscreens of cars and collects in the gutters, universal, existential moments. Perhaps today we don't have the same interest or attention span for the daily details, the mundane happenings. What does it mean to observe? We have lost the ability to see the everyday, it is forgotten, we forget we need it. It seems obvious, the space our bodies occupy and take up, but the obviousness is a mask covering what we need to see. Writing is essential to this process, to capture the feeling of seeing the reeds blow in the wind, to notice the sun changing its position on the coffee shop slowly each day. We are a world built on words like never before, a worthy medium of recording that should not be ignored. Writing about the everyday is to ensure its survival, to bring it into brilliance and make it worthy of note. Just because you walk past the same bus stop, patch of trees, corner-shop, coffee shop, is not to say these things stay the same. Yesterday and today and tomorrow and tomorrow, space changes.
French novelist Georges Perec makes known in his writing the invisible details we overlook in our daily lives. This project materialises the act of observing the everyday, of noticing space, and is a kind of thank you, an ode, to him. Perec asks us to question how we navigate our space, and this project expands on that question. ‘Ode to Perec’ is a collection of observational, experimental writing pieces along with an exploration of methods of reinterpreting the everyday, inspired by works from Perec. A camera box, an adapted camera lucida, as a materialised form of the written work and everyday observations, along with instructions on how to construct such a device. This project is an exploration and reinterpretation of the normal, an investigation into the infra-ordinary using the combined mediums of writing and photography to communicate a lesson about the everyday. Yesterday and today and tomorrow, space changes.
Oh Frenchman, oh writer
Oh experimentalist, wizard o’er word play
with Einstein-inian hair and wild eyes.
You write to the masses
call upon them
to see the beauties of the world.
Gems in the dirt, faces in the ceiling decor,
shapes in the clouds.
Content to breathe your native air
on your corner in Paris, an idealised space,
listing the buildings, the people,
the passers by and the amblers.
The number of trees on a street in Montmartre,
the direction of the bus, its stops,
the colour of the drivers shirt.
You are fascinated by the spaces, the places
our bodies occupy, what is closest to us,
so close we forget the very existence of it.
How do we see what we have come not to?
You ask us what is new, what is old,
your writing booms off the page,
cascading down the streets of the everyday.
Letters fall on gutters and paving stones, bouncing like rain drops,
the shine from the letter-shaped droplets
highlights a detail we didn’t see before,
and you show us how to rediscover the familiar.
Rediscover a confusing world we can only hope to take in with our eyes,
cover with the soles of our feet
and try to understand.
To begin with our space, our proximal norms
to which we have the power to rewrite the narrative of,
to appreciate the consistency of the coffee shop workers, and the bus drivers, the sun skimming the surface of the water in the park,
and the bird that nests in your neighbor's porch.
Observational Writing
Wednesday 19th February 2025
Burgess Park, Bermondsey, London
15:27 - 16:15
Overcast day, patches of rain
Beginning of sunset
Picnics and birthday parties.
Pitiful attempts at couch to 5 k.
I have daily encounters with this park.
Today she is grey and overcast. With teenagers playing football dangerously close to where we are walking. Ball to the face trauma resurfaces. Two girls roller skate past.
The park is skinny and long, split in two by a small road. The first half of the park houses a small lake. Ducks and geese live here, and the occasional turtle/ terrapin? A communal garden and coffee shop sits next to a playground area. The shop sells magnets and soap and pins and hot water bottles and jars and jams and jewelry and ceramic vases and bags and umbrellas and bookmarks and chocolates and socks and posters.
And coffee.
In summertime there is barely room to stretch out on the grassy mound not far from the coffee shop. A good sunbathing spot. Trees dot the infant hill providing occasional shady spots to protect precious ice cream cones and take away ice lattes from melting in the sun's harsh gaze. Today however is quite the opposite - people walk quickly from tree to tree, it has begun to rain ever so slightly. The park has different moods season to season, being the most pleasant in late summer (i think).
The park is bordered by houses on one of its long sides by terrace houses, the other by much of the same, plus a school and a garage. There are infrequent trees planted along the bordering pavements. Now brown and in hibernation mode, they stand to attention quietly, creepily. There are bus stops and streetlights and mail boxes and gates and fences and planters and walkers and runners. Signposts and maps and paths and restricted zones and traffic signs.
There are also:
Three play areas
Seven tennis courts
One basketball court
One BMX track
One public library
Two war memorials
One football pitch
One cricket ground
One fishing building
Two outdoor gym areas
Two coffee shops
One creative workspace
One pilates studio
Two woodland areas
One footbridge
5 public toilets
And one historical Lime Kiln
Amongst the lists and the people and the weather there is a fisherman who sets up his tent in the mornings on sunday, and a run club and a tennis group. There is a new man working at the coffee shop who makes a terrible dirty chai, which is understandable as I asked him if he had ever had one to which he replied “No”. There is a woman who feeds the pigeons and a communal garden where one can volunteer. There is nothing grand about the park, no big write-home worthy event that takes place here, but it is a place I have come to know well, passing by every day, not necessarily going through or spending copious amounts of time in however a space that is integral to my daily existence. Noticing her daily visitors, her regular pedestrians and changing coffee shop workers, rediscovering the familiar that is taken for granted, taken for being concrete, on which your soles tread on without your feet ever touching.
Earth piece
Yoko Ono, 1963 spring
Listen to the sound of the earth moving
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Friday 07 March 10:00am
Burgess park, Southwark, London
Chairs at the top of the pond.
Standing to attention
At the waters edge
Plumed hats
Brown coloured
Not particularly robust
They blow easily in the light breeze this morning.
They stand in a loose formation
Haphazardly organised
Their ranks blur into one
With their thin bodies swaying side to side
I hear their gentle song
As they guard the grey blue water.
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Wednesday 19th February 2025 10:05 am
Home
Bermondsey, London
Four walls, rectangular and long, as in the nature of a rectangle but this one is unusually long. Unassuming yellowish-brown brick work with white pvc windows, 4 facing the front of the close in which the house sits. Standing next to number 2 and number 4, originally (presumably) built the same and extended later. Our house has a porch unlike 2 and 4, handy for dumping wet shoes and dripping umbrellas - it rains a lot in the city. We have lived here for two years now - it shows. KnickKnacks and crap placed carefully in all corners of every room, a curated selection of our material wealth. Plants, printed photographs, candles and records make up our fortune. A shared museum of memories. The living room is home to a large window facing the small, concrete back garden. Sun facing. The windowsill holds our plant children. Monkey plants, cactuses, padron pepper seedlings, and ones I can not name make up our small makeshift greenhouse.
Seasons change the atmosphere of the room. Summer is the most pleasant. The back wall seems not to exist - door constantly open and windows ajar, the outside is welcomed in. We like it that way. Winter is harsher in the room, but relief can be found in the sun's painterly presence, often in the morning and late afternoon, when we are fortunate enough to notice. The Sun's fleeting presence, her rays make their way through the windows, catching on the leaves and pots on their path into the room. Leaves dance on the walls, dappled yellow warmth paints the off white walls of our slightly cluttered but cosy home.
These four walls I have cried, laughed, fought and made up in. Sometimes my prison, sometimes my sanctuary. She doesn’t change, we like to keep things in their place, in their designated space. Never changing yet constantly different, I am provided with the gift of everyday life. I feel safe in my space. My experiences and material possessions picked up along the way of my journeys to and fro places of normality make up that which I call home. My fortune of familiarity, made more evident when I find myself in those rare moments shared with the Sun in my living room. An unexpected yet welcomed guest, intangible but somehow touchable, these moments of quiet contemplation help to make the vastness of everything that surrounds us seem clear and close to me. A little closer to understanding my place, my space within the everyday concreteness of the world to which I call mine, yet sometimes feel I am not yet a part of. This is why I appreciate the change in my normality. Sometimes the world spins so slowly it seems as if time stands still, and others so quickly it seems impossible for my legs to keep up. My corner of the world for the moment may be unassuming, yet daily changes make it worthy of note. Everyday the sun hits my living room at a different angle, and everyday is different from the last. I just have to observe.
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Monday 10 March 09:58am
Home, Southwark
London
My room is a garden room
Not in the garden, but overlooking her.
The garden,
She is concrete
And grey,
A little bit green,
A little bit brown.
Four flower beds
Sparse but inhabited
By plants and flowers
We sowed together last spring.
We planted our flower children
Together
Haphazardly, carelessly
So when the flowers bloom now
They come in patches, or not at all.
But I like to be surprised
By their comings and going’s.
Patches of red poppies claim the long bed
Small green bushes that made it through the wintertime.
Beneath my window
A plastic planter of herbs.
Mint, chives and thyme,
we cook our eggs with them.
In summer i open my window to the makeshift garden
And listen to the sound of the house moving.
The traffic is loud but I dont mind
Sun pours in and out of my room
And heats up the patio,
Warm underfoot I like to spread my toes over the stones and watch the ladybugs and the bees.
I would not have chosen this garden for myself
But she was almost chosen for me,
And I have made it my own.
A small, concrete, poppy dotted sanctuary
In the mess and noise of the city,
I appreciate having my garden room.