“What speaks to us, it seems to me, is always the event, the unusual, the extra-ordinary: five columns on the front page, big headlines. […] What is really happening, what we are living, the rest, everything else, where is it? What happens every day and what comes back every day, the banal, the everyday, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the usual, how to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?” Georges Perec formulates here, in the collection L’Infra-ordinaire, this desire which presided over all his work: to give “a language” to what we are beyond the spectacular and its headlines.

Since 2009, the artist Daniel Blaufuks (Lisbon, 1963) has been tirelessly photographing a corner of his kitchen and the micro-events that inhabit it, as the days go by, the summer rains and the autumn suns. His series, entitled Tentativa de esgotamento, is a Lisbon echo of the French writer’s 1974 Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (Attempt to exhaust a Parisian place) undertaken from a café terrace in Place Saint-Sulpice. In it, Perec recorded everything he saw, drank and ate, in a desire for totality. At home, in Lisbon, Blaufuks records with a plurality of forms and scales (Polaroid, photographic camera; miniature slide, monumental print) the life of the window, the one that stands against it, as the days go by. The corner of the table, the kitchen -a familiar environment, perhaps the most frequented in the course of a life-, this intimate space apparently empty and silent is arranged here in the exhibition space, for our reading. From a pair of barely folded glasses to a pile of coins, from impressions to clues, it is the artist’s life that the photograph traverses, as from the pages of this diary folded at the end of the table, a little of the rumor of the world spreads.

Event organized in the framework of the France-Portugal 2022 Season