WHAT HAPPENS IF NOTHING HAPPENS
other than the weather, people, cars and clouds

Tique Gallery, solo

An attempt at exhausting a place.

I got inspired by the writings of George Perec, more precisely the book “An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris” from 1975. In this book, he describes things which are generally not taken note off, to question the habitual, the mundane. He want his readers to shift their focus to the “endotic” things in life, to (re)discover the space, the time and the poetry in everyday lives, which most directly affect us. For three days, he sat in a busy square in Paris (Place Saint- Sulpice), in “an attempt to exhaust the place”, and learn more than you could learn about life from a newspaper.

“The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. (...) What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noire, the habitual?”

I decided to not plan anything and focus on the habitual Perec describes. This resulted in an archive of, more or less, 300 photographs on 35mm film. All made during a walk of one month in Morocco. There is no storyline, and images follow each other by coincidence. Nevertheless, as a viewer you unconsciously make associations and create a narrative.