Elena Gorn

In a space deprived of pre-established supports, the subject is forced to rely on the micropolitics of the body. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted, the body is not merely an object in the world; it is the very instrument of our presence, the point from which the world becomes possible at all. In a situation of existential fragility, "grounding" ceases to be a metaphor and turns into a physical procedure: pressure, step, fixation. The body here acts as an active archive that does not merely record experience but materializes it through resistance to the environment. We no longer seek protection in monumental facades; we create "nodes" at the intersection of our routes and the external constraints of the environment. According to Michel de Certeau, such walking transforms into a spatial practice—a way of appropriating the anonymous geometric grid of the city and turning it into a "lived" place through dynamic equilibrium.

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Stability in such a coordinate system acquires a processual character. It is not static, but pulses at the points of contact with what Georges Perec called the "infra-ordinary"—the background layer of reality consisting of scaffolding, accidental anchors, and temporary cords. Attention to these details is not merely an aesthetic choice but a radical epistemological turn. We begin to notice infrastructure where we are used to seeing void or noise. These utilitarian details become elements of a new navigational interface, a kind of "portable foundation" that we rub into the surface of our everyday experience. Here, a paradox of access arises: we are forced to entrust our safety to these fragile points of support, realizing that we do not control the conditions of their existence. Identity is assembled through a manual synthesis of ruptures, where every "seam" becomes an attempt to preserve integrity under conditions of constant decay.