the infraordinary

In Jenny Odell’s book Saving time: discovering a life beyond the clock (2023) she discusses George Perec’s concept of the infraordinary:

In A 1973 essay called “Approaches to What?” the French writer Georges Perec coined the term infraordinary. Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary – things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual. This was no small task, given that invisibility is part of the very nature of habit. “This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia,” Perec writes. “We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”

– Jenny Odell

In some ways the work that Katye and I were doing in the studio is unequivocally everyday. There’s not much to see, there’s not a lot of action … there’s certainly nothing extraordinary about it. But it is also not ordinary and Perec’s thinking is useful. How might we seek to render visible that which is invisible? To peer into or within the ordinary. To be awake to the meeting of feeling and sensation and then wrestle with ways to communicate such remarkably complex everyday actions.