Art of Temporary Living: Looking Inside Student Rooms

Through four brief fragments, this chapter establishes a cause, an approach, and a context for an aesthetic inquiry into student rooms as places of transitory dwelling and materialisations of an art of temporary living. First, based on the notion of the “arts of doing” (arts de faire), the art of temporary living is defined as the ensemble of tactical, everyday practices that shape and are shaped by the students’ landscape of home. Second, the infra-ordinary gaze is presented as an approach for investigating how the basic level of everyday life is lived through its mundane practices and materialities, Third, through a discussion of Georges Perec’s novel La Vie mode d’emploi, and by situating it within the wider context of the visual culture of voyeuristic illustrations of urban domestic interiors, a certain aesthetic is defined for such illustrations along the lines of architectural precision coupled with an exhaustive attention to the mundane traces of lived space. Fourth, the student bedroom is discussed and studied through original illustrations created based on ads posted on online platforms for renting or sub-letting rooms to students in Bologna, Italy. Finally, two recurring material elements of the student room are explored in order to shed some more light on the art of temporary living as practiced by university students.