Paper short abstract:

Can a collection of materials be used to track changes in 20th century everyday life? Inspired by Georges Perec and his eye for the ordinary, changes in everyday life is explored through the lens of three 'non-things' from such a collection - a spectacle frame, a broken nail and a piece of concrete.

Paper long abstract:

"How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? [...] How are we to speak of these 'common things'?"

One answer to these questions asked by the French author Georges Perec could be to explore changes in 20th century everyday life through everyday objects like the ones preserved in a collection of materials at a technical university.

Among hundreds of things in the collection, you find spectacle bows of light titanium from the 1990s throwing light on the connection between materials development and fashion. There is a broken nail molded in zinc telling war stories of shortage, experimenting and failure, and a concrete sample contributing to the history of the concrete jungle of many cities.

In the paper, I use these objects as a lens through which I track and explore changes in everyday life in all its ordinariness. I look at what kinds of histories of the past we can tell, when we use such objects as inspiration and sources. Do they merely function as symbolic objects illustrating histories we already tell? Or, do they offer something new to the study of the ordinary?

In addition, I discuss, whether the concept of 'non-things' (inspired by studies of non-places and non-events) could be a fruitful way to describe such objects, we normally do not pay much attention to and seldom preserve at museums.