One of the most common obsessions of the modern world is the revolution of the everyday object, those things that surround us at all times that we use and then get rid of, without imagining for a second a life without them. We live surrounded by things, from the plates and glasses we use for eating, to the computer and pens we work with...our lives would be impossible without them; they are creations made exclusively to serve us. They make up our everyday surroundings. But these small and at times insignificant things define us; they say something about who we are, forming elements of our personality. We present ourselves to the world and live through them.

Objects live a parallel existence beyond us. They make up a collective memory and their abundance or scarcity defines part of our freedom. Archaeological remains, historical documents, evidence of a crime, fragments of a love story, these small things can mean a moment of happiness or cause us eternal angst. The existence and use of objects, be they incongruous, mysterious, anonymous, fantastic or absurd, mark the difference between the everyday and the exotic, normality and what’s strange. Present in the history of art, always discrete and in the background, 0the objects observe us, creating an uneasy atmosphere which often goes unnoticed as we are so used to it. Current art has unquestionably turned objects into the protagonists of artworks, making the background surroundings jump to the foreground.

The central artist of EXIT #11 - Ordinary Things, William Eggleston (with a text by Thomas Weski) has built an everyday world which is recognisable from the details of common and unimportant looking objects taken from the lives of anonymous people from anywhere. But to illustrate the different ways in which current art represents the world of objects, we include five special portfolios: Silvia Gruner (text by Itala Schmelz), Chema Madoz (text by Fernando Castro Flórez), Takashi Yasumura (text by Martin Jaeggi), Cinthya Soto (Text by Cinthya Soto) and Peter Fischli & David Weiss (text by Rosa Olivares). Each of these five artists has a different approach in their relationship to the world of the everyday object, encompassing violence and obsession; solitude and detachment; irony; the impossibility of life balance; and the permanent deception of appearances.

The works of artists such as Gosbert Adler, Aziz+Cucher, Mira Bernabeu, Victoria Encinas, William Henry Fox Talbot, Alberto García-Alix, Claus Goedicke, Tim Head, André Kertész, Angel Marcos, Martin Parr, Irving Penn, Concha Prada, Bernhard Prinz, La Ribot, Olivier Richon, Iké Udé, Howard Ursuliak, Eulália Valldosera, Edward Weston and Christopher Williams, amongs others, complete this issue.