Curating activism into Everyday life
Two and a half years ago, I moved to a large scale housing settlement constructed of blocks - the experimental landscape of the 60s & 70s. Like many academics, I was overlapping my professional and personal life, not really clear on the boundaries. Living in this type of neighbourhood made me return to my personal poetic, philosophical and spatial concepts of what a home is and what constitutes qualities in everyday living. It also made me curious on the topic of spatial appropriations, I was on the lookout for practices, places and phenomena which informally twisted the obvious lack of human scale. A few months into lock down as a migrant woman, I was perpetually contemplating: How could this place provide a fruitful everyday living, when most of the time it felt like being Juliette superimposed to the suburbs of Paris?
Mapping loose spaces and thresholds in Everyday life.
The art in which we compose our Everyday life and the choices we make on a daily basis are a significant part of place-making our authentic personality within a context.
More than often we have been influenced to think of the everyday as a routine, as something repetitive and commonly full of boredom and disappointment, where the accomplishment of a more meaningful time is placed, well, somewhere in the future. We continue our everyday life, frequently in survival mode, placing our hopes not in the everyday, but rather in - another day. Due to different circumstances, from very young, we start to learn to surrender our power to extract the fruitful landscape of possibilities for production, creativity and activism seeded into the everyday. For some reason, at the given moment, in the now and here it just doesn’t resonate.
“Everyday life is not to be seen as something that is static, but a dynamic and changing site.
..It is indeed by following people, things, representations and narratives that we encounter the very trails that are important and arrive at the intersections where meanings and changes are made.”
Two and a half years ago, I moved to a large scale housing settlement constructed of blocks - the experimental landscape of the 60s & 70s. Like many academics, I was overlapping my professional and personal life, not really clear on the boundaries. Living in this type of neighbourhood made me return to my personal, poetic, philosophical and spatial concepts of what a home is and what constitutes qualities in everyday living. It also made me curious on the topic of spatial appropriations. I was on the lookout for practices, places and phenomena which informally twisted the lack of human scale. A few months into lock down as a migrant woman, I was perpetually contemplating: How could this place provide a fruitful everyday living, when most of the time it felt like being Juliette superimposed to the suburbs of Paris?
There was a section in my life during this period. An overlay of circumstances endowed me with what you would call a rite of passage, a time period which marked my life moving from one stage to another. It came with deeper attentiveness and awareness for the everyday living. Everyday life was precious, powerful, full of possibilities to be active and authentic. I took the time to reconsider many decisions: where I lived, where I worked, the relationship I was building with my child, whom I was in a relationship with, who my friends were, with what I wanted to fill my working and free time. I wondered what kind of changes could I personally integrate into the dynamic landscape of the everyday? What if my promised future was actually now?
Gardening versus stagnation
While mapping and researching my neighbourhood I was often walking. One day I discovered a beautiful garden in one of the inner courtyards. It was a delightful surprise. Most of the courtyards were sealed landscapes, look, but you can not touch. Signalling that even playing ball isn’t allowed, thus minimising the simplest possibility of spatial reinterpretation. And there, hidden between poor maintained landscapes, existed a garden, a claim over open public spaces coated with no-initiatives and stagnation. Someone in the neighbourhood curated food production spatial activism and appropriated the underused green with a community garden - a milieu of vegetables, trees and flowers. It was blooming. Someone had just hacked the everyday.
At this point, it became very clear to me, that from the smaller scale to the bigger scale decisions, I was place-making myself in everyday life. My morning and bedtime routines, where I bought groceries, my eating habits, where I travelled, how I commuted to work, all mattered and contained power to understand the everyday in its essence, far beyond something for granted. I decided to shift my approach from treating the everyday life as something given to something gifted. In a way, this calling was always with me, but living in this particular spatial constellation intensified it. It proved once again how much the quality of urban design and the places where we live can have a deep influence on us as individuals.
Mapping loose spaces and thresholds in Everyday life.
Flâneuse - Activist
Soon enough, I reinforced my beliefs that we can inject changes by the choices we make throughout our own everyday life practice. It started to feel like mini-scale revolutions. In the city, I perceived myself as a Flâneuse - activist, walking and engaging with the urban by becoming part of unexpected discoveries and sharing my beliefs in the community. In my personal life, I took time to care and love, I attended and was more present for my closest people. I gave space and time for my dancing, meditating, drawing, writing, creating, nurturing practices.
The narration of situations of my everyday life became full of possibilities of inserting and communicating principles, values and opinions. They started from the smaller scale, some for myself, some for my family and my community, some for the city and the land where I live.
I was transforming the endless to-do lists with intentions. I cut, craved, folded and bent, adding my own coordinates of change. More than often my days started to feel like a magical cartography, where I was active to express my personality and create my own garden-milieu of concepts, hopes and dreams that went further than the framework society had for me as a person.
Mapping loose spaces and thresholds in Everyday life.
Attending to Everyday Activism
How could we curate activism into everyday life? I find value both in the small and big scale choices on how we position ourselves as individuals within our communities. In Situating Everyday life, Sarah Pink defines everyday life as a context of human creativity, innovation and change, a site where processes towards a sustainable future might be initiated and nurtured. From domestic to public spaces we have the possibilities to act while grounding ourselves, our homes, families, gardens, parks, while taking part in the city. By giving time and being attentive to who we are as people, we can nourish our integrity and individuality. By taking the selfless acts of nurturing our families, we can cultivate young minds and hearts with certain beliefs and values which will be pillars of future communities. By becoming active players within the scenography of the city, we will discover new stories about places and people around us and be open to a variety of narratives and lifestyles.
“The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.”
I believe we can be radical by cultivating awareness and attentiveness. Our choices can become thresholds - creating vibrations and looseness in the rules, standards or expectations of how we should actually be. In my neighbourhood, a whole space was transformed just because a person decided to plant a garden. A single act started processes of situational crystallisation: people came with picnic blankets, children used it as a playground, it became a popular meeting point. Situations unfolded because of a decision to act upon individuals beliefs within a given order.
The more I take the time and energy to be attentive of the composition of my everyday life, the more I am aware where I can place my mini activism. I don’t always call the shots, however I decide to continuously try. It starts from the microcosmos of my home, to the extending threshold between the domestic and private, spilling out to the spaces of my neighbourhood, continuing to the scale of my city. I know that even when I decide something in the smaller scale I have the power and energy within me to influence and place-make my own truth and values in the bigger one. My activism is grounded on the premises to bring closeness on the scale of my heart, to my thoughts, to my words and my actions. I grasp the preciousness of everyday life and this is where I place my garden.
Mapping loose spaces and thresholds in Everyday life.
