With the increasing number of lockdowns all around the world, what coronavirus has deprived us of the most – besides, of course, the unfathomable absence of our loved ones – is what we have been most effortlessly ignoring and even sneering at. Everyday life: life as it flows ceaselessly through streets, squares, bars, cafes, restaurants, bistros, shopping malls, nightclubs, grocery shops, opticians, cinemas, theatres, operas, kindergartens, schools, universities, business centres, dorms, offices, trains, buses… It is, though, not only these places, each of which has its own affective tonality and atmosphere, but also the very material soil out of which they are orchestrated – “the very solidity of the filled space” as Harry Harootunian puts it.
Trees, mountains, meadows, rivers, flowers, plants, mud, stones, dust, wind; and, of course, animals, bugs, insects, viruses are part of what we call everyday life. Not only organic life, but also furniture, clothes, utensils, tools, windows, glass, concrete, computers, cell phones, chairs, tables, screens, lots of screens, and all sort of tangible yet inanimate products in the midst of which we dwell. In other words, places, nature and artefacts, by which we experience space. Everyday life – a gigantic number of interactions of an enormously complex nature impossible to represent in a single event. In its most renowned thinker Henri Lefebvre’s words:
And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.
