Paper short abstract:

Using a multi-sited visual auto-ethnography, this research is located in the concern and challenge of unveiling the inhabitant’s experience, by understanding time and space as an inseparable unit called timespace. From here, it intends to investigate and discuss the residential habitat by unveiling the lived experience hidden in the daily life.

Paper long abstract:

The study of residential habitat in the cities mainly uses a spatial approach. However, in its conception, the idea of the passage of time has been left behind, focusing basically on physical-spatial issues. This has defined and encapsulated human existence into spatial containers. However, looking at residential habitat from an inhabitant's experience, it is possible to unveil how its production emerges as a continuous process of place making, in time and space, understanding both as an inseparable unit called timespace.

The concern is made present by unveiling that which makes up the experience, an issue that is hidden within the ordinary and familiar. Therefore the challenge is composed by the difficulty of working with the experience and the construction of a method of capturing it in its uniqueness.

This paper works with the trajectory and information gathering of the author's personal experience of timespace. The methodology constructed autoetnography, using photographs as a means of memory extension that would allow capturing the becoming of the experience, and thus constructing a visual story that would be able to reveal it.

The experience of timespace, was constructed by using images obtained during two years in the author's life and three explorations were developed that would capture the experience as it was being produced through time. The photographs were used as text, exposing reality from a frontline position. Thus, this research is a visual auto-ethnography, seeking the experience of another, not from a distance but, in the vicinity of the everyday.