In Species of Spaces, French Novelist Georges Perec looks into “spaces that are close to hand”.
“There’s a whole lot of small bits of space,” Perec writes. “To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.”
Species of Spaces - p. 11
He starts with the way text inhabits the space of a page (see scan above) and goes on to examine the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the building, the street etc.
For Perec, space begins with the textual description of the space and with the signs that represent it:
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. ”
Taking a more hands-on approach to this exploration of the relationship between space and its semiotic representation, I’ve build a 3D room made out of parts of Perec’s text . The words describe and represent the space and at the same time actually (or rather virtually) create it.
Species of Spaces – Georges Perec in 3D from Shira G on Vimeo.
I’m not sure there’s anything to be learned from this little experiment, but I do like the way the text creates a space that seems both solid and fragmented, fixed and floating, logical and unreal.
I heartily recommend reading Species of Spaces (as well as perec’s other books, as a matter of fact). Some of the text is available on Google Books.
