Imagined Space

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Matylda RasmussenSarah Bodil Hansenmail@imagined-space.dkBlog: imaginedblog.com Web: imagined-space.dk Font: Garamond

Contents

Before Greenland Theoretical approachMethodsTheory and praxisRendering the recordingsConclusionInspiration

Contents

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Apartment block in Nuuk, Greenland

Before Greenland and our final thesis

This project is a pilot project before we go to Greenland, for our final MA thesis work in the autumn. We have in this project, practised work-ing with sound as our main method with the living meeting. In our program we have explained the living meeting this way:”(...) when we enter the meeting, we will not be in a static position, from where we can collect life stories, like they were scientific data in a petri dish. We are go-ing to shape it with our own imagined space, while the inhabitants in our project might also have their own expectations of who we are and why we are etc.” Program p. 6:2011

We wanted to create an intimate space for our informants, where we could talk about the past, present and the imagined space, as well as considering our own role in the meeting. We might have shaped the conversation just by being present with our own stories and expecta-tions of who they are before entering their homes. Gaston Bachelard and his thoughts about the intimate space, as being not only the pres-ent, but as much the past and the imagined space, has been quite in-spirational.

We have also been inspired by the French writer George Perec and his experimental novel ”Species of Spaces and Other Pieces” The writing style is very playful in a down to earth kind of way. We thought this could be an interesting perspective in the project and we have particularly been inspired by his pragmatic and detailed way of listing objects. We saw this way of working as a possibility to start the conversations with our informants. Instead of asking questions about their dreams, hopes and past memories, we have asked them to talk about their objects of the home. In this way we wanted to create a gateway into their lives without asking in an overwhelming manner.

It has been important for us to work with these everyday life stories, in order to somehow practise the meetings in Nuuk. We hope to show an honest and perhaps different side to the lived life of the apartment

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block. It has many depressing stories, - or myths, surrounding it with its grey iconic concrete walls. We wish to break down these walls, for the people living there to tell their own life stories and to give them a voice in our project.

Problem Statement

How can we create a tool box, with focus on sound, that will help us to rehearse and capture the following: Staging the living meeting with the inhabitants, in order to explore the idea of everyday life as the imagined space: the present, the past and of the daydream.And to:render this living meeting to interested listeners, without letting the intimate space we have created along with the inhabitants, appear flat or two dimensional.

We wish to focus on the dialectic relation between ourselves as designers and the inhabitants of our field study, during the work with this tool box.

We have tried to focus on this statement during the work with our proj-ect. The next sections will elaborate further on our reflections within: the interviews and working with sound; the use of theory in the project and we will furthermore set out perspectives relating to the final thesis in Nuuk and whether our work can contribute to the design anthropologi-cal practices.

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Theoretical approach

Here we will present a short overview of the theoretical material that we found inspirational and explain why we have chosen to focus on them. We will reference to it during the report and comment on the theory more thoroughly in“Theory and praxis”.

George Perec

From the beginning to the end Species of Spaces and Other Pieces was a very inspirational novel which contains Perec’s pragmatic observations in Paris, starting from a blank page, his bed, his room to the city and the countryside. Throughout the book he offers various exercises to how one can observe a defined space in the most detailed manner. It is the ordi-nary and the things we encounter in our daily lives which are in focus, and nothing should be left out in observations of the space one occupies.

It is a very personal account and a free play with words, which could be interesting in our own approach. Not necessarily as a written account but we would like to transform some of this playfulness into sound and images, which could perhaps describe the intimate space in a new and hopefully honest way that is not limited by a set of academic framework or by a strictly anthropological approach. Program p. 9:2011

Gaston Bachelard

“An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.” Bachelard p.5:1974

When discussing which approach to take in our project we knew that we wanted to capture some of the unspoken sides of doing fieldwork.We want-ed to somehow capture the soul of the homely and look into the shadows

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Inspiration

behind the obvious daily rituals. We did not want to avoid the daily life but see it as a gateway into the poetic and oneiric thoughts of our informants.

“The house is, according to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, where we feel secure and where we have our most intimate space. It is the start-ing point of our existence in the world and the place where we connect the experiences of the past, present and of the daydream. In the combination of the three the “imagined space” comes to life. This imagined space contains the subjectively perceived reality of the inhabitants and of our selves as de-signers. The idea of life as the “imagined space” is not only based on actions or thoughts of the current, but it is as much the past and the space of day-dreams.” Program pp. 3-4:2011

It was relevant for us to focus on life within that space, as we want to base our study on the lived life in a home. In order to gain personal stories and meaningful experiences, we have concentrated on how we could create an intimate meeting where the inhabitants would open up and, together with us, create an intimate space where these stories could unfold. With inspiration from Perec we wanted to take our departure in the pragmatic description of objects and how they are placed in the house, and Bachelard has been helpful to take it a step further and ask about which feelings and dreams the informants connect with their objects or the rooms of their home, both in relation to the past, present and the future. Bachelard’s theory on how the past reverberates into the now and into our dreams of the future, where his point is that these memories of the past will never have the same tonality as one is think-ing about them in relation to the future, one must create an oneiric space to be able to put oneself in the exact same situation and experi-ence the exact same feeling once again. This is where our challenge in rendering the sound will be.

“All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a daydream in which I shall find repose in the past. Then I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true - a voice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear [...]” Bachelard p. 13:1974

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Michel de Certeau

“Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice.” de Certeau p.115:1984

To make a distinction between Perec’s pragmatic description of places and Bachelard’s phenomenological description of spaces we have been inspired by de Certeau’s division of the two in his examination of daily practices. He makes a distinction between space and place, where a place is where every-thing has its “proper” location in a defined stable location. Whereas “space is a practiced place” and is defined by actions that are executed in a defined place. There are two general ways in which people describe their own home as the example below shows:

“In a very precise analysis of descriptions New York residents gave of their apart-ments, C. Linde and W. Labov recognize two distinct types, which they call the “map” and the “tour.” The first is of the type: “The girl’s room is next to the kitchen.” The second: “You turn right and come into the living room.” de Certeau p. 119:1984

The map is a description which relies on an outsider knowing where the rooms are in relation to each other, in another way describing what is seen where the tour takes the listeners by the hand and guides them through the apartment in an action of movement. de Certeau argues that when telling a story one gives references to different elements that mark the place and space and excludes all other non-mentioned elements in leaving them out of the story.In our project we have been very aware of how the inhabitants have told their stories, and have tried to make them describe their home in different ways to see where the personal stories might be situated in the rooms and in their objects.

“[...] the story plays a decisive role. It “describes,” to be sure. But “every descrip-tion is more than a fixation,” it is “a culturally creative act.” It even has distrib-utive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it found space” Bachelard, p.123: 1974

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Methods

The purpose of this project was to examine and explore the possibilities of working with sound during the meetings with our informants.

“We imagine sound as our main working method. It might give us a ”three dimensional” view into the homely space we wish to examine, hopefully it will give us an opportunity to render our findings in a holistic manner, that keeps the space open and less harshly angled than, for example, solely visual or written representations. We believe that sound could create a room, where the listeners of our recordings fill it with their personal oneiric thoughts along with our interpretations of the homely sphere.” Program, p. 3: 2011.

Although working with sound has been challenging it has also been giving in terms of getting our informants to reflect on their objects. It was crucial that they explained how they looked, what they were etc., because the listener is not able to see visual representations. It has been a good way of getting started with the conversations, without being too difficult or daunting for them. It created a space, the time and perhaps removed the pressure of having to describe their entire lives and inter-ests in the beginning of our visit. A sort of controlled small talk.

In arranging the meetings we did not want to have a finished guide to how we wanted an interview to elapse, it was important for us to stay open to whatever might happen during our visit. The conversations should rather be dictated by the objects in the home and what kind of stories the inhabitants would tell, than our expectations to how they lived their lives. The next section explains how we have worked with the methods during the project.

How to approach the field

In the beginning of the project we had the idea of entering the field by hanging around in the public areas of Mjølnerparken and from there

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getting to know people passing by. We thought that by being present in the area people would perhaps invite us into their homes after some time. After a few field recordings we decided that this was not the best approach and that we should try and establish contacts within our net-work. This was based on the fact that we wanted to practise the meeting itself and be less concerned with our informants ethnic or demographic affinity. It was not crucial to focus entirely on people living in apart-ment blocks for this pilot project. We visited four different people:

- Viggo, 81, Odense C- Christian, 29, Mjølnerparken, Copenhagen- Birgitte, 56, Hollufgård, Odense- Cecilie, 24, Mjølnerparken, Copenhagen

after having conversations with them all, we have chosen to work more detailed with Cecilie. This was not a decision based on the fact that she lives in an apartment block, but she lives close by us, so it has been easy to visit her again in terms of travel time and economy.

Listing things

Using sound as a method has been a poetic way of working. Especially because we have been focusing on objects in the home. The absence of imagery has forced the informants to describe them in detail, which could bear a resemblance to the writing of the French novelist Perec and his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. In the novel he uses lists to document and describe the Parisian everyday in a very playful and free way.

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Trying Perec’s listing excercise

This example is from page 43 of the novel where he is describing an apartment building:

“1 bathroom stool11 upright chairs2 armchairs1 leather briefcase1 dressing gown1 hanging cupboard1 alarm clock1 pair of bathroom scales1 pedal bin1 hat hanging on a peg1 suit hanging on a hanger1 jacket hanging on the back of a chairwashing drying3 small bathroom cabinetsseveral bottles and flasksnumerous objects hard to identify (carriage clocks, ashtrays, spectacles,glasses, saucers full of peanuts, for example)” Perec, p. 43:1974.

The first meetings with each informant have confirmed that focusing on objects could be a way of letting people portray themselves in a storytelling way that seems honest and empathetic. The objects of the home and how the spaces of the homes are used say a lot about the peo-ple that inhabit them and as a starting point people like talking about themselves, they are the experts of themselves and we are interested in everything they have to say. We gave each informant the exercise to list the objects in a self defined area, to try Perec’s method as written above. This might give the stories a poetic twist and make the informants think more about what things they had in their home. As it turned out, the listing of things came quite naturally when they gave us a tour of the apartment. They all knew that we were interested in their objects and began listing their things in each room as we passed them. All

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of the participants had different ways of talking about their objects and every home was filled with stories. Not all objects had a strong meaning connected to them but some had stories that could give the listener a chance to experience the feelings that the inhabitant attached to them. It was, however, very varying how each person related them-selves to the objects. Birgitte had the top of a whole cupboard lined up with objects that took her back in time in the form of memories of her childhood home, travelling and presents from old friends. This was the place in her home where her past was most visibly housed. For Christian and Cecilie, the objects were very much part of their identity. Every single thing in their house held some importance, not only in terms of personal stories or memories, but they were also selected to create a holistic interior of the home in accordance to their life style and convictions. Christian, a cabinet maker and design student, had an opinion about nearly all of his belongings. An example could be some industrial clocks on his living room floor. He had found them in an abandoned factory, all set on ten minutes past six. Perhaps they were all stopped when the last shift was over. He found that very interesting and saw them as a symbol of the way times has changed. All manual labour has been outsourced and left many Danish factories closing down. Christian was very much against the global mass production and the consequences it has for the environment. It is something he works with in his own designs and also in the way he chooses to live in his apartment. Viggo on the other hand was very detached from his things. Although they held importance to him in terms of personal relations and memories, he was not able to articulate these meanings to us. They had become an integrated part of the existence in his house and became almost like a implicit layer of every room. Therefore it was difficult to get into the deeper meaning of each object, as he had not been verbally explaining them to anyone before. With Christian it was a natural part of his way of talking about himself as they were almost like accessories of his identity. Perhaps this could be due to the age difference, Viggo is 81 years old and with Christian being 29, there could be a lot of dif-ference in how they would relate to personal objects. This is something we should consider when we enter the apartment block in Nuuk. There will be many different age groups and this could affect our approach to

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Christian’s clocks

Visiting Viggo in his home in Odense

the meeting. We have to consider that objects mean something differ-ent to each person and maybe not everyone will be used to articulating what meaning they hold.

Printing press

From the beginning of the project we had an idea to use a printing press as part of the interview. Partly because we would like to have an imprint of some of their objects, and of the stories connected to those objects, to somehow create an oneiric image of an object the inhabitants felt repre-sented themselves. The other reason was to use the process of printing them as a way of continuing the conversation. We thought that the printing process would give our informants an idea of the project being of a more artistic and experimental type, where there would not be a wrong way to talk about themselves or answer our questions and hopefully they would talk about themselves in relation to the object in a more intuitive manner. From there we had hoped to leap into new paths of the stories attached to the printed object in a non-direct way. This, however, was not really the case with every interview. At Cecilie’s place especially, it became more of a chore than an actual advantage to the conversation, even though it helped her understand our project as a more experimental kind, it fragmented the flow of the talk in a way which was not lucrative for the process. We should have continued talking about her objects in the kitchen area as we felt they had a lot of meaning to her. Instead we kept to the plan and carried on with the printing. In the future we should only use the printing press if it will help the flow of the conversation. It can be very hard to define beforehand, as every meeting will be different. In some cases it might work better as it did with the conversation with Christian. The press became a “cosy” part of our meeting, where Christian bobbed around the living room looking into his card board boxes filled with his per-sonal belongings. Many of his things were still packed in boxes due to a recent divorce. We felt a little hesitant about asking into the content of the boxes because of this, but by focusing on the press and letting Christian entirely decide what to dig out of the boxes and letting the

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pressure off him by avoiding looking over his shoulder with the dicta-phone, he became much more relaxed. The atmosphere became much more cosy and it felt like a joint project instead of us regarding him as our informant. In the last two interviews with Birgitte and Viggo, we did not include the press. It did not seem important or lucrative to the conversations so we decided to learn from our meeting with Cecilie and left it out. Instead we asked for a donation of an object that we could print ourselves later on. This worked well and nothing lacked from our conversation by not including the printing press. In our field study in Nuuk we have to be open to changes in the plan, if the conversation is not gaining from, for example the printing press, we should have the possibility to leave it out of the meeting.

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Print of Christian’s objects “Things through time”

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Print of Cecilie’s objects “Lego”

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Print of Viggo’s object “Skeleton from bathroom”

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Print of Birgitte’s object “Vanilla Cane”

Blog

During our design process we have been keeping a blog with ongoing reflections on the meetings and our experiences using sound. The reflec-tions have been both written accounts, photographs and unedited sound bits. It is possible to read the posts here: imaginedblog.com

This has been an opportunity to write about what we have experienced in an unstructured and generative way, where we have not been con-strained by any rules or formalities as in, for example, report writing. This has enabled us to reflect in an ongoing manner without feeling the pressure of producing a finished theoretical publication. It functioned like a logbook, but with the opportunity of presenting mixed media, such as sound and photos. It is a good way of remembering all the small thoughts, we would otherwise forget when moving on in the project. It also gave us an overview of where we were in the design process and what we needed to elaborate on or leave out of the project. That way it functioned as a mapping tool for our thoughts in the overall design pro-cess. It could have been a good idea to update the blog more frequently in order to gather a substantial amount of material in one place. During this project we have spread out our thoughts in various sketch books and loose papers. In Greenland we could benefit from taking out one or two hours at the end of each day to reflect on the day and publish it to the blog.

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Theory and praxis

In practising the living meeting with our informants we have been focus-ing on the home and the objects within that place. In the beginning we did not have a clear focus on what to ask about, but we let it be open and up to our informants to lead the way. This was partly a conscious decision from our part, where we felt that it was important to include the informant in deciding the orientation of the meeting and the project. It was also, however, because we did not know how to enter the living and intimate space of their homes. We felt like it was a blank page where we would need help to fill out the emptiness of the white paper. In the lack of direction in the beginning we might have gained a pragmatic descrip-tion of their homes through the objects, but how did we go from discuss-ing mere objects to creating a space where we would be led into their intimate sphere with all the daydreams, where we could ourselves dream with them?For this analysis we have been inspired by Michel De Certeau and his thoughts on what divides place from space. As we mentioned earlier in the section: “Theoretical Approach”, there is a difference between the two. A place could be described as a static entity, whereas a space is activated - or lived. In relation to our project we could consider the home in our first meeting as a place with objects that have not been activated, but remain static in the rooms of the house. During the course of the project it became evident that our main challenge was to leave this static place of the meet-ing in order to enter or activate the intimate space. In this section we will only comment on the meetings with Cecilie to make a more thorough description.

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The first meeting

At the first meetings it functioned well to let the inhabitants take the leading role, without too much interfering from our part. After we had listened to and interpreted the recordings, it became clear to us, where some of the stories waiting to be unfolded were, as some of the objects seemed to contain a lot of meaning for the informant. The knick knacks on her kitchen shelves were explained as meaning a great deal for Ceci-lie but she did not have further comments on this statement and it has been a challenge to ask into the meaning of these objects. The objects worked very well as a way of opening the conversation, but we have had difficulties about raising personal questions about them. We would like to be empathetic around our informants and careful not to cross hidden boundaries, but on the other hand, we also have to ask interesting ques-tions to avoid a superficial small talk, which holds no interesting points to our listeners or to ourselves. This is something that is important to practise before entering the field in Nuuk. We want to record real life stories and give our informants a voice, without addressing only positive or romantic ideas of how their lives unfold in the apartment block. How did we manage to activate the place and achieve the spacious daydreams of the home? It was not only a matter of asking the right questions, but establishing a space of trust and security, where our informant would share her memories and her daydreams with us. In the beginning we focused the conversation on objects and hoped to establish a playful and pragmatic atmosphere, which could help us remove some of the pressure and shyness from her. As she realized that we were interested only in her objects and what stories she might tell us in connection with these. She had thought a great deal about how she had arranged her home, but now she had to explain it to someone who did not really know her and because we were only relying on sound as our media she had to articulate everything. How does it actually look? What do my things look like? Where are my things? Everyday objects are not something, which people generally reflect on, they just exist as passive elements in a static room. The objects on her kitchen shelve for example were consisting of wres-tler figurines on skateboards (she skated herself ), small plastic toys from Kinder Surprise, several ceramic animals and small Eiffel towers from her

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trips to Paris, these objects meant something to her as collectors items and souvenirs but did not contain deeper meanings. This approach might appear simple, however, it did help us gain awareness of the place and the objects along with Cecilie. It can be related to Perec and his novel “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces”

“Things we ought to do systematically, from time to time” [...]

“In apartment buildings in general:look closely at them;look upwards;look for the name of the architect, the name of thecontractor, the date it was built;ask yourself why it often says ‘gas on every floor’;in the case of a new building, try to remember what wasthere before;

etc.” Perec, p. 44: 1974.

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We have followed some of his exercises from the novel, mostly to create a playful setting for our meeting. When listening to the recordings they became almost poetic. Cecilie has described her kitchen to us in a very minute and careful manner, which created a visual representation of the place. She described it as a square place, with a small white kitchen table with peeled of paint, two old 2nd hand chairs, shelves with many small objects from kinder eggs and other toys, her favorite stool in the corner near the window, her spices in the sun, the dishes waiting to be done, the crooked shelves with cook books that her mother put up and her big fridge with pictures hanging on the front. It did not, however, open up a space for us. We had to find pathways within the place, in the kitchen, somehow map the objects in order to activate it. How could we go from the place, to a space in which we could record the reverberation of her memories and her daydreams? We listened to the recording of our first meeting and realized that we had to focus on a smaller area of the home in our second meeting. Because we had gotten the minute description and because Cecilie herself had explained that she regarded that place as the most important to her, we decided to let the kitchen be the setting. It was important as it was the place she most frequently used and where she would have guests and where she felt safe -in her little corner near the window. From our earlier conversation she mentioned two paint-ings on the wall. They were interesting because one could represent the past with a lot of memories hidden, and the other represented the fu-ture and the daydream. We had come to this interpretation by reading Bachelard and his thoughts on the imagined space being not only the present, but as much the memories of childhood, the future and of the daydream. How we perceive reality is based on these three angles. The house is where we are born, where the world starts and it is the safe set-ting that protect us from the outside elements. This could be related to Cecilie’s paintings in her kitchen. She felt safe in her home, that specific seat in the corner near the window, where she has an overview over the whole kitchen. Her corner of the world.

“For our house is our corner of the world. As often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” Bachelard, p. 4:1974.

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The second meeting

At the second meeting with Cecilie, we felt that we had established a common ground for talking about her life, an intimate space, where she did not feel hesitant of talking about her past and dreams. We had constructed a montage on the theme of what her apartment meant to her and played it for her at the beginning of our meeting. She said that it was a very honest portrait of how she felt and the montage made her consider how she talked about her objects in relation to herself, as it had become clearer to her what kind of project she was a part of and how we worked with her stories. She explained that she was a little confused of our intentions in the first meeting and unsure of what to say to us, however when we began focusing on the kitchen she felt like she could explain the importance to us. It was where she would daydream, on her favorite stool and where she felt safe, had an overview over the apart-ment, - and her life.

“There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of inti-macy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-being.” Bachelard, p. 12:1974.

At first she did not go into detail about the two paintings. The meaning was implicit to her, it was obvious. We felt that there were many layers lying within the two objects and that they could perhaps lead us into a deeper conversation and let us take the leap from the kitchen being a place into an intimate space.

“Not only memories, but the things we have forgotten are housed” Bachelard p. xxxii:1974.

We mentioned our thoughts to her: did the painting of the elephant on the wall represent the past, the memories and the forgotten things? And the other painting, which had “A Beautiful Life” written on it, did she think about the future and why was it so important? We had set out a path which she chose to follow, but she did, from then on, open up a space for us to enter. We could perhaps be led into her memories from

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her childhood and of a happy oneiric place somewhere in the future. We started talking about the painting of an elephant, it had been given to her when she lived in Tanzania with her mother, this lead to her thoughts about what her mother meant to her. She was a role model or as she put it herself: “she was the strong man, being a single mom, and she was the mother” She gave an example from Tanzania where she had fallen and hurt her knee, the cry made her mother prepare antidote because she believed that Cecilie had bitten by a snake, while being this caring mother she was also able to put up shelves in the home or build her own table. This lead us into how her mother and the memories of her childhood home had shaped the way she would now arrange her own home as an adult. The oneiric memories of her mother and her childhood reverberated into the present and the way she lived her life today. We began talking about the other painting and what it meant to her. She explained that it was the heart of the apartment. It reminded her of better times and of having her own place in the world. It re-minded her of happiness. She began describing her dream home and suddenly we had moved from the childhood memories into a conversa-tion about the future and of the day dream. She could give us an almost exact and detailed description of how her dream home would look like and how it would feel. She dreamed of a blue wooden house with a white balcony, near the forest and the sea, with a kitchen and a double bed - as she explained: “who wants to have a home on their own”.It seemed that focusing on the kitchen as being her corner of the world, her favourite room, and by entering a conversation about the two paint-ings we had changed the place into a space that had been activated and filled with memories and of daydreams. Bachelard had enabled us to create a focus within the meeting, where we had set out a path for Cecilie to follow. It opened up the conversation and it became a living meeting, where we were able to dream together with her.

We will, during our examination, play recordings from the meeting and discuss this further afterwards.

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Rendering the recordings

One of the main reasons for working with sound was that it might help us create a space where the stories of our inhabitants would be represented and rendered in an authentic and three-dimensional way. It might give the listeners a chance to imagine a place where their own stories are part of our recordings. In an article in the Danish newspaper Information the professor Ib Poulsen who has researched Danish radio culture for many years comments on the subject of sound gaining in on visual media. He argues that the renewed interest in sound can be seen as a counter reaction from the visual. There is a potential for an experi-ence, which the image cannot meet. With the visual media one always has a viewpoint and can look the other way. Sound surrounds you from all sides, and it becomes more corporeal, and maybe therefore more exciting. (source: http://www.information.dk/260311).

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We have been focusing on the living meeting in the rendering of the sound, where we will give space both for our interpretation and create a room for the listener to dream along with the informant’s stories. We have been focused on making a slow universe in which there is time for the stories to unfold.

After working with the project it has become clear that sound is a meth-od which can help to (re)create the homely space of our informants in a spatial way. However it is not necessarily through mere arrangement of the recordings. During the project we kept a blog and uploaded “raw” and un-edited material of interviews, we had an idea of this being the most honest way of showing our findings, but it did not seem to really give a personal impression of our informants, but rather pieces of con-versation that did not point in any direction. It was not until we started working with interpreting the recordings, that we could begin to recre-ate the homely space. When we were working with the audio montage, we could more easily connect the essence of the different stories about the objects, into a narrative that can give the listener a more in depth impression of who the speaker is and how she lives. Many of Cecilie’s stories were connected to her now fulfilled dream of moving in to her own home, but the stories came as integrated parts in different contexts and if we would chose one story it would not give the full impression while if we played two or three stories after each other it would be either too long or too repetitive. It was important to find “tracks” within the stories that could be followed up and create interesting anchors. It is at this point that we, as designers of the project, have become a visible part of the story telling. Although they were all Cecilie’s stories we have been part of selecting parts of importance in the recorded material and build up a more inclusive space. The challenge for us is to translate several hours of recording into something more edible for an outside listener, it will be a mix of our notion of the storyteller as a person, and what their stories mean to them together with the need to shorten some of the stories to be able to create a consummated image of the inhabitant and the atmosphere of the home, while leaving enough space for the listener to imagine their own life within these stories.

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“All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a daydream in which I shall find repose in the past. Then I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true - a voice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear [...]” Bachelard p. 13:1974

By building a setting of selected parts of the interviews and the sounds from the Mjølnerparken yard area, we have tried to re-enact the three dimensional space of the living meeting and recreate the intimate space we built up with Cecilie. The sound of her voices had an intimate tonal-ity in the quietness of the home, and listening to the small sections of stories told in a quiet voice had an almost poetic side to them compared to all the loud noise we are surrounded with in our everyday, especially through commercial media.

“The level of noise has risen over the centuries, but more important has been the use (and abuse) of the loudest level of noise by those with authority” Sonnenschein p. 185:2002

In our montage we have focused on portraying Cecilie through stories about the present, the past and the daydreams. We begin our setting in the present where Cecilie explains how excited she is about having her own apartment and why the kitchen is so important to her. In the beginning of her description of the kitchen she tells the story behind the elephant painting hanging on the wall above the kitchen counter. She had been given the painting on a trip to Tanzania with her mother, here we travel to her past and some of the experiences that might have shaped how she lives now. The second picture hanging on the wall next to the door to the hallway is an illustration ripped out of Bitchslap magazine and this she explains is representing her future in the apart-ment, as it was the first picture to hang in the apartment and she was reminded of the feeling of finally getting her own home every time she looked at it. We continue the portrait with her story about how she wishes her future summerhouse will look like to leap into a daydream, a dream of the future. In between the clips of the conversation we have added the field recordings from the playground area. This has created

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a spatial atmosphere and some breaks in between the talks. With this we hope to recreate the idea of everyday life as the imagined space: the present, the past and of the daydream and sustain the intimate space we have created along with the inhabitants.

Page from Perec’s novel

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Our toolbox

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Conlusion

It has been important to practice the meeting before entering the apart-ment block in Nuuk as we only have one month to gather the record-ings. This project has given us the opportunity to develop a set of prac-tices which we can get inspired by in our MA thesis. In the rehearsal of the meeting we have especially focused on getting from talking about the home as being a static place into a space filled with the memories and daydreams of the informants. It has been important to create an intimate space where we have included ourselves in the meeting. By trying out our methods from this project we have gotten some ideas of how to enter the field in Greenland. We experienced that they have to be used differently for every person and that some of them might be excluded in some situations. It has also been challenging to frame the project to ourselves and explaining it to the informants. In the begin-ning we did not have a clear idea of what we wanted out of the meeting and this confused the informant. We must include ourselves and let the project be transparent. The theory has been helpful to frame our project, especially at the meetings. Perec has given us the idea to focus on the objects and be playful in the way we approach the meeting. When talking about the objects Bachelard has been very useful to help us move from a place into an intimate space. We tried to activate the objects in order to hear the memories and daydreams of the informant. Michel de Certeau has helped us to become aware of the difference between place and space. His writing has linked Perec and Bachelard and gave us a framework within the project. We have regarded Perec’s writing as concentrating on the place with all its objects, whereas the space could be related to Bachelard and his thoughts on the home and the daydreams. Sound has been useful in the rendering of the meeting. It gives the listener a chance to create their own oneiric space together with our informants. The montage as a method has helped us recreate the space of the living meeting in a three dimensional manner. Our in-terpretation of the space has been important and the raw and unedited material did not work as way of creating an interesting portrait of our informant. We needed to find paths within the project and lead our sound in a direction determined by us as designers.

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Inspiration

Bachelard, G. : The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1958. Orion Press, 1994. Boston

Binder, T. : All-in-a-box. In: Rehearsing the Future, 2010. The Danish Design School Press, Copenhagen (pp.58-62)

de Certeau, M. : The Practices of Everyday Life, 1964. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California (pp. 115-130)

Dewalt, K. ; Dewalt, B. & Wayland B. : Participant observation, 1998. In H. Russel Bernard (ed.) Handbook of Methods in CulturalAnthropology. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press (pp. 259-299)

Halse, J. : Theorizing through practice, 2010. In: Rehearsing the Fu-ture, The Danish Design School Press, Copenhagen (pp.146-49)

Hammersly, M. & Atkinson, P. : Chapter 2: Research design: problems, cases, and samples. 1995. In: Hammersly M. & Atkinson, P. (eds.)

Ethnography: Principals in Practice. London. Routledge (pp. 23-53)

Liebing, A. ; McLean, A. : The shadow side of fieldwork: exploring the blurred borders between ethnography and life. 2007. Malden MA, Blackwell Publications

Mattelmäki, T. : Design Probes, 2006. Gummerus Printing, Finland

Olwig, K. Fog. : Cultural Sites: sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world, 1997. In: Hastrup & Olwig (eds.) Siting Culture: The shifting anthropological object. Routledge: London & New York

O’Reilly, K. : Ethnographic Analysis: From writing down to writing up, 2005. In: Ethnographic Methods, London. Routledge (pp. 175-204)

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Perec, G. : Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974 . Clays Ltd, 1999. St Ives plc

Sonnenschein, D. : Sound Design, The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema, 2002. Michael Wiese Productions

Spradley, James P. : The Ethnographic Interview, 1979. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston

Tzara, T. : No. 15, July/August 1920 Chronicle, To Make a Dadaist Poem. In: Ades, D. (ed) The Dada Reader, A Critical Anthology, 2006. Tate Publishing, London

WorkshopsSjunnesson, D. : Arduino workshop, The Danish Design School, Copenhagen, 30.05 - 03.06.11

Sommer, S. : Lydfortællingsworkshop, The University of Copenhagen,16.03.11.