The Infraordinary as Spatial Discourse: Tongue of the Dry Cleaner

Most of us pass along kiosks, pubs, dry cleaners, turn street corners, rise up stairways on a daily basis, in a sort of spatial anaesthesia. These spaces that facilitates our everyday existence are ‘worn half-invisible by use’, thereby not given due attention.
Through his occupation with the infra-ordinary Georges Perec questions and interrogates the habitual (the background noise, the obvious, the banal) through literary constraints, forms of attention and transformation of awareness. Here we are offered an approach for looking closely at the everyday world around us.
By setting up my own framework of perception, I interrogated a London dry cleaner as an (infra-ordinary) urban function:
Tongue of the Dry Cleaner uses creative writing and critical spatial practice as tools for gaining insight. It moves through the elements of the space and production line of the dry cleaner, unfolding it bit by bit. The structure of the book is fragmented and ambiguous, thus reflects the way one ‘reads’ the dry cleaner itself. It contains coded messages in 3 columns (dictionary entries, quotations and narratives) and from the friction of those meaning appears. The costumers found their way into the book - and the writing onto the hangers of the dry cleaner, reintroducing the space to the users. The unheeded spaces and objects have ‘a function that is separate form their practical use.’2 A dry cleaner is not simply cleaning clothes, but a social vertex and interface through which events unfold, trajectories thickens and people of the neighbourhood coexist through events in real-time and depositions over time. The infra-ordinary as a spatial discourse interrogates and acknowledges the latent qualities of the common and seemingly banal, yet vitally important, spatial materiality of everyday life, as an alternative to architects’ and planners’ often rational and reductive idea of function and programme.