The Manna House Bakery & Patisserie

An attempt at exhausting a place (in Edinburgh)

4 – 31 August 2014

In 1974 the French writer and filmmaker Georges Perec wrote the book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, in which he spent three days in a cafe describing what he could see and hear. He commented that this act was about making notes on "what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds".

In a contemporary reconfiguring of this event, Alice Finbow, a London-based filmmaker and photographer, will partner with the Manna House Bakery on Easter Road to take on Perec’s task: a woman in a different town and a different century, but with the same romantic inquiry into the image of the artist and his/her relationship with the world and how to capture it.

 
Alice will sit in the cafe for a whole week in August, observing the daily goings-on, the people, the staff, the menus, the cakes, the conversations and the view from her seat. Her observations will be translated into a single roll of paper the exact length of The Manna House’s single display wall, covered in drawings, photographs, recorded texts of conversations she’s heard and had with strangers and regulars as well as other visual findings

At the end of the experiment, this roll will be displayed in the cafe as a document and a portrait of a place in Edinburgh. 

Residency, 4-10 August; Artwork display, 11-31 August

Mon-Sat, 8am-6pm

Sun, 9am-6pm

Free admission