UnSearching for Rue Simon-Crubellier: Perec Out-of-Sync

Is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it? This is the ‘pataphysical’ question posed by artists Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda in relation to their 2004 work Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier. These Australian artists play at tourists abroad, reading George Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Via a series of recorded meanderings through the streets of Paris, interviews with passers-by, civic officials and eventually Marcel Bénabou, the artists come close to tricking the world of actuality into believing in the existence of an imaginary place. The collision of the apparent ‘truth’ of video testimony and the fabulation of Perec’s fictional world is central to this work. This chapter proposes to dis-engage Neumark’s and Miranda’s Perec-inspired exploration of the real and imagined relations to location. Through a series of imposed constraints, inspired by the formalist construction of Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier itself, this chapter will postulate leaving only a rhetorical that is the antithesis or dark matter of Perec’s novel: Is it possible to dematerialize something that does exist by unsearching for it?