12-dec-24 — Yunzhi / Melissa Li

Notes

08-06-2025

02-05-2025

16-04-2025

15-04-2025

06-04-2025

29-03-2025

20-03-2025

11-03-2025

11-03-2025

28-02-2025
21-02-2025
12-12-2024
29-07-2024
Bibilography

12 December 2024 - On noticing space through Perec

From investigating digital and physical spaces in my dissertation, Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces has resonated with me and influenced my thinking in the current project on “home.” His inventory of the everyday does not romanticise domesticity but insists on its strange significance. When he writes about rooms, beds, doors, or walls, he dissects them gently. His tone is analytical yet warm, as if he is both cataloguing and grieving for things that are disappearing as he observes them.

Perec begins with the page, and slowly scales outward: bedroom, flat, building, street, city. This expanding radius of intimacy influenced how I thought about mapping “home” in my work. Perec planted the seed that home is not singular. It’s scattered, layered, and structured around habits and fragments.

The chapter The Bedroom struck me in particular. Perec names the acts we perform in spaces as a way of defining them, and sleeping, crying, and remembering. He collapses the myth of the neutral space. A bed is not just furniture, but rather a space layered with rituals, often solitary yet universal. He writes with care about the ordinary: what’s under the bed, or how we leave a room. That tone has stayed with me, especially as I began collecting interviews. I wasn’t looking for grand memories, but rather the ordinary ones, the small moments and fragments of memory from people’s livid experiences. Reading Species of Spaces early on gave me a language for the quiet textures of space and the idea that intimacy can be traced spatially, not just emotionally.

Some keywords to note from this reading: scale, rhythm, and interiority.