Everyday Index by Solvita Krese and Inga Lāce
On diaries
Several years ago, while I was sorting through the shelves of a long untouched, heavy mahogany commode, I found a diary from my teenage years where I had registered with great care the life events of the time. Mostly, everyday activities that from time to time are interrupted by a visit to the theatre or an exhibition, a trip to my friend outside the city in the countryside or an unexpected encounter. Statistical information interchanges with emotional passages and rather naive conclusions and existential ruminations. Reading page by page, a fabric of a life reveals itself before the eyes, interwoven with both seemingly unimportant and significant events that are kept together by the persistent repetition of daily activities. I can discern the threads of many interrelationships, the sprouting of thoughts, which can be read from the notes made in the rather unclear handwriting, or which hide behind words and wander between the rows of letters. They have significantly influenced the future life of the author of the diary, formed habits and beliefs, encouraged the choices and the concealment of insecurity and fear.
Several of my friends and acquaintances still make regular entries in diaries, which perhaps help to organise thoughts, to arrange life in a sort of completed sections or to get rid of troublesome feelings which circle in the mind and prevent from falling asleep late at night. Writing of a diary often becomes one of the regular daily activities similar to walking, cooking, dishwashing or combing hair. These activities create the framework of our life, which serves as the background on which ambitious plans are carried out, new heights are conquered and stormy dramas and personality transformations take place.
The fact that people look at and are jealous of one another, that they write each other letters or have lunch together, that they have sympathetic or antipathetic contacts, quite removed from any tangible interests, that one person asks another for directions and that people dress up and adorn themselves for one another – all the thousands of relations from person to person, momentary or enduring, conscious or unconscious, fleeting or momentous, from which the above examples are taken quite at random, continually bind us together. Every day, every hour such threads are spun, dropped, picked up again, replaced by others or woven together with them. Herein lie the interactions between atoms of society, accessible only to psychological microscopy, which support the entire tenacity and elasticity, the entire variety and uniformity of this so evident and yet so puzzling life of society.(1)
On things
Things have the ability to tell stories. Ever since the 16th century, in “cabinets of curiosities” they, together with works of art, archaeological finds, and artefacts from the worlds of plants and animals, as well as different objects of inexplicable origin, have been placed in collections revealing the unusual and creating a world. These objects can provide a message that extends beyond their spatial borders and aesthetic properties, telling about the time, location, customs, social and political context. Along with ethnographical museums and the preservation of living spaces of historically significant persons in memorial apartments, everyday objects attract special attention. Rooted in local or foreign culture, they can offer exotic fantasies and the idea of accumulating local or personal history. However, being placed in special cabinets and museum halls and signified by the annotation, these things lose their everydayness, gaining the status of an art object.
Archiving of the everyday can be practiced in different ways. Similarly, the character from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s story “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” never threw anything away. Obsessed with the elusiveness of everyday life, he tried to preserve it with the help of material objects. By neither throwing away transport tickets nor shopping receipts he had turned his apartment into a repository from which the inhabitant himself mysteriously disappeared. While reading the story, it seemed unavoidable to disappear between the things that there are too many of.
Every transport ticket could tell a story of the journey, the ticket controller, the seller, the inside pocket of the bag as well as the company where it was printed. Each thing simultaneously possesses a myriad of potential stories, among which – imagined ones with the familiar everyday object turning into something else. In adult life, quite often they have to be repaired or one thing replaced by another for practical reasons. Yet, in childhood a spatula became an airplane simply because it was possible.
On the nature of the everyday
The dwelling place where we know every corner, the distance travelled countless times from work to home crossing the landscape whose details we have stopped noticing, actions repeated every day mark our “daily choreography” – predictable and surprising at the same time. Everyday life can quite easily get crushed under the weight of boredom, the home can become a suffocating prison and repeated activities turn into a depressing routine. Or, on the contrary, the everyday can become a protective refuge, a secret ritual, an exciting mystery. It can release the tension caused by the pressure of the “big things” and provide an unexpected pleasure. It may be imperceptible, inconspicuous and unobtrusive. It can both inspire and overwhelm.
On plants
The Greeks [..] go much further back, to the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes. From the depths of the ocean to the streets of modern megapolises, there is a continuity and permanence in these tactics.(2)
When spending time in city apartments and offices in high-rise buildings, a houseplant, placed somewhere on the windowsill, table or in the corridor, is a constant companion. As a child, I was confused by names such as “snake plant” that was so lively that its off shoots regularly had to be shared with neighbours or relatives, as well as – aspidistra – commonly called “home blessing”, which being placed between the desk and the windowsill, in our house constantly withered away. Later, when friends started visiting me, a cactus in a pot was a popular present. Later in the 1990s, visiting the families of my friends, I discovered the silver dollar plant which seemed to have a more direct connection to well-being and not as naive as our “home blessing’s”. After some time little palms, orchids and ever more exotic plants started to appear in each home.
It seems that indoor plants in their limited windowsill pots or balcony boxes have long since stopped using the art of adaptation inherited from their wild relatives. But in reality exactly those have become indoor plants which have been able to adapt to the uniform temperature, the small amount of sunlight, the different air humidity and the regular watering as opposed to the naturally existing irregularities. Indoor gardening was characteristic already of the Romans and Greeks, who grew plants in pots and most likely occasionally brought them inside their homes. In Ancient Egypt and China plants were also put in pots, but most likely in gardens which were an organic extension of the indoors. Of course, the Japanese should also be mentioned, having directed a lot of attention to the artificial cultivation of miniature trees. Until 1608, when Floraes Paradise by English writer and inventor Sir Hugh Platt was published, indoor planting had not been extensively described. Since then, greenhouses for exotic plants were built ever more often and indoor gardening gradually became popular in private homes.
Talking about tricks and the art of adaptation, weeds come to mind more naturally. Their root system seems to be more insidious than any gardener, and weeding for me has always been more related to a meditative pastime than effective fight against the weeds. Giant hogweed, the only plant species included in the official list of invasive plants of Latvia, was brought from the republics of the Caucasus as silage in 1948. It quickly spread to the wild, forests, river valleys, shrubberies and neglected fields, its proliferation getting out of control. The natural “enemy” of giant hogweed is the harsh climate of its homeland, however, upon arriving in such conditions as in Latvia, it finally is unhindered and spreads ever further.
On snapshots
Everyday life can be viewed as a repository of moments in which countless different “snapshots” have entwined into a single ornament, revealing its diversity and multilayered nature. Highlighting a specific activity outside the flow of daily life and focusing attention on a mundane action, we see it as a special experience that is freed from the conventional habits of the mind and viewpoints guided by common perceptions, we notice that everyday life is not a homogeneous mass and we become interested to live in it.
On noticing and the unusual
A curious effect of habit is to make the familiar seem invisible. So some people take holidays. They travel not just to get away; they travel to be able to see the place they live in from a different angle when they get back. Another way to get a new perspective is to chart what you see and know. Close your eyes and imagine walking on one of your regular routes. The amount of information you have stored in your brain will come as a surprise.(3)
On the microscopic and the macroscopic
One can look at daily life in different ways, microscopically – zooming into everyday activities – making “snapshots”, as well as macroscopically – trying to look at these events in a much broader context where daily events reverberate in societal processes on cultural, as well as social and political levels.
Thus the simplest event – a woman buying a pound of sugar, for example – must be analyzed. Knowledge will grasp whatever is hidden within it. To understand this simple event, it is not enough to merely describe it; research will disclose a tangle of reasons and causes, of essences and ‘spheres’: the woman’s life, her biography, her job, her family, her class, her budget, her eating habits, her way of using money, her opinions and her ideas, the state of the market, etc. Finally I will have grasped the sum total of capitalist society, the nation and its history. And although what I grasp becomes more and more profound, it is contained from the start in the original little event. So now I can see the humble events of everyday life as having two sides: a little, individual, chance event – and at the same time an infinitely complex social event, richer than the many ‘essences’ it contains within itself.(4)
On cooking
The poetics of everyday life manifests itself very prominently in the process of cooking, which for many people has turned from an unavoidable daily activity into an exciting hobby, a creative process, a constituent of a family therapy and a sort of a ritual. Is there a gourmet who doesn’t have his own little secrets that are inherited from the grandmother or an experienced chef or discovered through experimenting and now enabling roundabout navigation through recipes, improving and clarifying them and earning unequivocal delight of the eaters? How to pour dough on a hot pan so that the underside of the pie remains crispy, how to slice an onion, so that it maintains its juiciness, or what to do to keep the jam from caramelisation... “....entering into the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things makes one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived without exhibiting itself, in short, a very ordinary intelligence”(5), asserts Luce Giard virtually echoing the insights of the students of the legendary Kaucminde Household Institute, whose culinary “tricks” are reminiscent of the “childhood taste” and, as if in a session of psychoanalysis, allow recognising the imprints of the past in the present, leading the imagination to wander as far as madeleine’s cakes, described so eloquently by Marcel Proust.
On knitting
At the beginning of the 20th century, in Shetland, Ireland, peasant women knitted while walking and carrying baskets of peat on their backs. One might see the totality of these synchronous activities as an earlier version of the contemporary multitasking, which today is substituted by simultaneous clicking of different keyboards, phone calls and hurried movement around the city.
Knitting, together with other crafts and everyday household chores, spread in art during the 1970s along with feminism and its proponents, who broke barriers and denied differences between the high and the popular.
Knitting as an everyday activity has a symbolic meaning in the context of the festival. It is a process where several threads are entwined together, bonding the participants of the festival, their ideas and the visitors, also speaking about creativity, which is reflected in the invention of new designs.
On Survival K(n)it 7
This year, the contemporary art festival Survival Kit, held in Riga already for the seventh year, is realised with the title Survival K(n)it 7. It encourages thinking about the dropped stitch in the row of letters, about knitting and knotting and invites to see the potential, hidden in the repetition of everyday activities which has the ability to provoke the gene of resistance, to create a landslide of contingencies and induce a striking chain of causal relationships that knit together the private and global space. By mapping routine daily activities it is possible to comprehend the impact zone of “small things”, revealing causality between seemingly unimportant pursuits and great narratives or global clashes.
Survival K(n)it 7 weaves several local and international art and cultural institutions in a network, encouraging to consider the role of middle-sized institutions in the activation of the art system, their methods of survival, the need to work together and develop a common strategy, involving in their activities both the local community and nearby residents, as well as representatives from other fields.
On strategy and tactics
Analysing everyday practices, French philosopher Michel de Certeau calls them “the art of doing” and argues that daily activities like walking, reading, house cleaning and cooking contain a strong potential of resistance against various repressive systems of the contemporary society. In this context, he also marks an important distinction between strategy and tactics. That is, strategies that include long-term plans and goals are used by power structures, such as state or local government, businesses or institutions, attempting to order the surrounding world within a series of hierarchical relations of regulatory rules and a totality of systems. In turn, tactics that focus on solving a specific situation are used by the individual, making use of their defensive potential that lies in the mantra of repetition of small things both in physical and psychological terms.
Daily practices are often associated with the aspects of gender, striving to make the everyday as a background for the articulation of feminist ideas reflected in the slogan of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s– “the personal is political”. The fact that such a broad socio-political movement dives into the everyday context is signalling the inexhaustible potential of the everyday to generate new forms of political activism.
In turn, the political and social movement of Saint-Simonians, established already in the early 19th century, stood for the values of equality of the members of society and progress and during their so-called “industrial performances” in Paris a couple of dozen men publicly performed such activities as dishwashing, button sewing and shoe cleaning while singing at the same time. In this manner they wanted to show everyone their idea of a future society in which the understanding of masculinity and femininity is changed along with the social hierarchies and the idea of art.
On revolution
The everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant without truth, without reality, but perhaps also the site of all significations... hence the weight and enigmatic force of everyday truth.(6)
Where, then, does this mysterious force of the everyday lie? Does it appear in “the revolution of everyday life”, which was once defined by the Situationists (notably by Raoul Vaneigem), who suggested blowing up the everyday of the consumer society with the unprecedented intensity of creativity and spontaneity, mixing daily routines in novel combinations. Perhaps the daily revolution is disguising itself, instead of major resistance activities choosing to ignore the conditions of the society of the spectacle, moving slower and slower, because there is no reason to go faster.
_____
(1) Simmel, Georg The Metropolis and Mental Life [1903], Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone) Sage: London, 1997, p. 109.
(2) Certeau, Michel de, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking. Trans. Timonthy J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998., 158.
(3) Roithuizen, Jan The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam, Hand drawn perspectives on daily life. Amsterdam University Press, 2014, p. 9
(4) Lefebvre, Henri The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, 1947, John Moore trans., London: Verso, 1991., p. 57.
(5) Certeau, Michel de, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking. Trans. Timonthy J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998., 158.
(6) Blanchot, Maurice Everyday Speech, trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987), p. 14.