Before the novelty of London’s supermarket culture had faded — or perhaps it was simply the experience of living alone — I spent several weeks investigating the Lidl near my apartment. Through mapping, photographing and sorting, I began to notice what was happening inside this seemingly ordinary space.
In The Street, from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec describes the familiar street elements: automatic street lights, bus stops, telephone kiosks and baskets which passersby would glance at (Perec, 1997). He pays attention to things that usually remain in the background of everyday life. This reminded me of my own investigation. Shelves, products and shopping trolleys, appearing almost like randomly respawning NPCs in a game, all seemed to participate in the daily operation of Lidl. By repeatedly recording these details, I began to see the supermarket not simply as a place for shopping, but as a space with its own rhythms and systems. Yet what I could see was only the tip of the iceberg.
Perec (1997, p. 47) writes that streets, unlike buildings, belong to no one. I connected this idea to my own experience. As I wandered through the supermarket, it felt as if it belonged to me. I recorded these changes from my first-person perspective. At first, I connected Lidl’s time-limited offers to temporary museum exhibitions. As my investigation continued, however, I began to see the supermarket more like a factory. Asian Week products, such as kimchi gyozas and Japanese-style sauces, disappeared from the shelves within a day, replaced by toilet paper and kitchen rolls, before Mexican and Spanish products appeared.
In addition to recording these changes with repeated fixed-point photos and fact-based notes, I also speculated in a subjective way based on the frequency of restocking. Were the red grapefruits selling well? Did people in the neighbourhood drink more sparkling water at weekends, perhaps even for a party? These were only guesses; my photographs could not confirm them. Shannon Mattern’s discussion of interconnected systems helped me consider how small, visible traces might offer a way to approach larger, partly invisible processes, while reminding me of how much remains beyond my limited observation (Mattern, 2013). Also, Perec’s instruction not to write “etc.” encouraged me to keep recording details that might otherwise be overlooked (Perec, 1997, p. 50).
To connect a week of photographs with the relatively stable positions of 11 shelves, I attached scale-based fold-out sections to a map. Although this format brings time and space together, I will continue to explore how to make invisible processes, such as restocking and purchasing, visible without making them immediately perceptible.
Perhaps there is a rhythm to all this, like the ebb and flow of a tide. Everything seems ordered, and yet perhaps there is no single rule behind it. I feel happy simply because I was able to see.
Reference list
Perec, G. (1997) Species of spaces and other pieces. Penguin Books Ltd.
Shannon, M. (2013) ‘Infrastructural Tourism’, Places Journal, July. Available at: https://doi.org/10.22269/130701
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