Hangin Clothes: Gestures of the Everyday Experience of the City

Abstract

Obvious and insignificant, hanging clothes spend most of the time unnoticed in our daily wanderings. However, leaning out of the windows or floating in the wind, they are part of the urban landscape of our cities. Moreover, in its supposed insignificance, hanging clothes suggest multiple aspects of current life: restrictions and inadequacies of space; work and rest routines; social identities and community coordinations. What do we see when we see hanging clothes? Do we still see our clothes? Or do we begin to see colors, shapes, stories, intimacies? Des-save and expose our clothes can interpellate us in several ways: what do we decide to expose? What is it legitimate to make visible? What things do we hide from the scrutiny of others? In this text we inquire about how the presence of hanging clothes can be understood as a series of gestures that refer to different approaches to the materialities that make up our daily experience of the city. Gestures that link the functional with the poetic and exposed with the intimate. Inspired by the notion of Perec’s “infraordinary” and based on the understanding of the importance of everyday gestures and the sociology of objects, we explore the sensitive, public and political power of hanging clothes in urban environments.