Performing the Everyday

The project investigates the automatism of behavior in urban space. Following Michel de Certeau, I distinguish between strategy—the rules the space imposes on the user (like a turnstile, a schedule, or a handrail)—and tactics, which is the way the user adapts to those rules. Automatism is a tactic that has outlived its moment: frozen within the body, it no longer deceives anyone or liberates anyone—it is simply performed.

In an automatic gesture, the rule and the adaptation to it become indistinguishable, which leads to the project’s central question: to whom does this action belong—to the city that prescribed it, or to the body that executes it?

The starting point was observing micro-actions in the subway: a hand gripping a handrail in an awkward posture, even though it could let go; a seated person rising when another enters before they have time to make a decision; passengers on the platform stopping where the doors are about to open… These actions are un-conscious both to those who perform them and to those around them. The learned nature of this behavior is a consequence of what Henri Lefebvre calls «training,» where the body, through repetition, assimilates an external rhythm and begins to reproduce it as its own.

Thus, automatism becomes an invisible form of power because it moves inside the body. The project makes it visible from various perspectives. A video piece featuring performers addresses the collective body: the norm that many share and which is sustained by a common rhythm rather than by individual decisions. A photographic series addresses waiting as a shared gesture: a long exposure erases passersby, leaving only the order into which the bodies have arranged themselves visible on the platform.

In this video work, I address the automatism of the collective body to show: the gestures learned by the city are sustained not by rules or the decisions of individuals, but by a shared rhythm—a compliance that has become a body, in which the command is no longer heard, only execution remains.

The method is built on observation: I collect micro-movements of people on public transport—the grip on a railing, the lean during braking, the rising movement when someone else enters—and compose a score from them for the performers. The performers receive the score as a task, not an image, and master it through repeated practice until the sequence no longer requires conscious attention; rehearsal reproduces the very conditioning. Through rhythm, its alignment, and its disruption, the work demonstrates mastery in its purest form: movement that occurs without reason is no longer a reaction, but conditioning continuing to run in a vacuum.

In this photo series, I approach behavioral automatism as a form of knowledge that the body stores without being consciously aware of it. It consists of photographs of subway platforms just before a train arrives, taken from a single vantage point and at the same time across different stations. The people on the platforms are not standing randomly; they are positioned precisely where the doors will open, even though no train or floor markings are visible yet. The long exposure blurs those who are walking, leaving sharp the individuals who have taken their spot.

By arranging bodies on an empty platform, the work explores the moment when invisible infrastructure manifests only through anticipation, showing that the city exists in bodies before it appears in space.