Phone Directory Within

Solo Exhibition
Galerie Billini (Paris, France)
11—15 April 2024

The title of the show, Phone Directory Within, is an excerpt from the book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by the French writer Georges Perec. 

It’s a very odd creature of a book, read by a lot of architecture students but I think unbeknownst to many others. It weaves together literature, architecture and psychoanalysis, similar in a way to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (although certainly less haunted). The entire book is basically musings on how we occupy space, from the domestic to the imaginary. 

Perec believes that we take space for granted—always thinking that we know where we are, where we are headed, what surrounds us—but that is actually rarely the case. He asks these seemingly futile questions about our being-in-space which, I think, is exactly the point. The questions seem obvious precisely because we have never taken the time to think about them. The title of the show comes from a section in which he talks about the fragility of these spaces. Here is the (slightly shortened) quote:

“My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them. The words 'Phone directory available within' or 'Snacks served at any hour' will no longer be written up in a semi-circle in white porcelain letter on the window of the little café in the Rue Coquillière. Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only Shapeless shreds.”

Besides the space-reference, I also enjoy how concrete the words are juxtaposed to my very abstract work. Phone Directory Within makes one think of, indeed, a phone directory, and it seems an odd title to represent work that has nothing to do with such domestic objects. The contradiction makes us do a double-take and question our assumptions—which, I think, is what Perec would have wanted.