Place Thingamajig

"I would like there to be fixed, motionless, untouched, untouched, and almost inviolable, unmovable, rootless places: places that would serve as a reference, a starting point, a source: the country where I was born, the cradle of my family, the house where I was born, the tree I saw grow (planted by my father on the day I was born), the attic of my childhood full of untouched memories..."

- Georges Perec

Species of Spaces is an extraordinary laboratory that recreates all the strategies of Georges Perec's work, harboring his later books as thought experiments, fantasies, cocoons, and potentials.

Perec starts with a blank page and follows the sequence of bed, room, apartment, building, street, neighborhood, city, countryside, country, world, and space, forming concentric circles that expand step by step throughout the book. He contemplates and dreams about the relationship between autobiographical data and spaces; uselessness, ordinariness, inhabitability, livability; windows, measurements, boundaries; the strange interaction between places and memory. He produces new projects, forms, and asks questions:

What does it mean to inhabit a room? Why and from what point on does a place become entirely ours? If we move the bed in a room, can we say that we have changed rooms? How does one think about nothing? Why do buses go from one place to another? How does one know their own city? What can we know about the world?

A user's guide to space, consisting of notes, digressions, assignments, exercises in looking and seeing, plans, obsessions, classifications, and listings for beginners; "a journal of a space user."