Attempting Exhaustion
Between Friday the 18 th and Sunday the 20 th of October 1974, the writer Georges Perec sat daily in a café at Place Saint-Sulpice, in Paris, thoroughly documenting what he saw, charting brief details of buses and people, dogs, funeral processions, and all he ate and drank. These notes of “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather” are the material for the book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a work focused on the infra-ordinary with obvious links to contemporary photography.
Between 2009 and 2016, I photographed a table and a window in my kitchen in Lisbon. I was first attracted by its silence, later by how the objects received the light,and, finally, by their geometrical composition. I couldn’t help noticing, more and more, how things repeated themselves without truly repeating themselves. Little changes, almost invisible transformations happened every day, according to weather and season. Unlike Perec’s tableau, as he saw it from the Café Tabac in Paris, mine was truly void of any action. In front of those luminous but opaque windows, the objects on the table were replaced in function of everyday needs: dishes, glasses, newspapers, magazines, flowers, napkins, the fruit in season, papers, instruments, maps. Retreating from the outside world, I slowly transformed my kitchen into a refuge, a shelter, a place for introspection and solace…
Daniel Blaufuks’s project is part of the group exhibition Archivi del futuro, curated by Diane Dufour, Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini.
