BREATHING RECYCLED AIR, AND FILLING A CARRIER BAG OF PROVISIONS

Matthew Claudel // Somerville

An introduction from our guest editor

I have been spending as much time as I can outside, in public spaces. Usually long, solitary walks, usually along the Charles River, not far from my home in Somerville, Massachusetts.

This is a new ritual for me, inseparable from the constraints and the emotions of a global crisis. And during these weeks of masked walks, I have become acutely aware of my breath. Inhalation and exhalation.

Each passing along the path is significant. What would ordinarily be a mildly uninteresting feature of a walk has become an electric three seconds charged with fear, camaraderie, apology, empathy—especially when I see elderly couples, grasping onto the ritual of the daily walk that they rutted for decades before this crisis, or new parents, pushing babies in strollers—or anger—when I see younger maskless folks, with their work-calls and gossip. None of these are reactions I am necessarily ashamed or proud of. They are simply the emotions that come with realizing that every breath is recycled air.

That is, I am realizing that each passing is an exchange, microbes floating from one body to another, each person marked by the moment of proximity to the other.

This isn’t new, of course, but I am newly aware of it—and I’m not the only one. “Contact tracing” flattens that rich, messy, reciprocal exchange into unidirectional visibility. Rendering moments of contact as data, aggregating and operationalizing them (in other words, surveillance) abstracts away from the very bodily, strange and admittedly terrifying realization that we are all in a reciprocal pneumatic relationship with each other.

Although these are very real concerns that cannot be ignored, focusing on contact as traced surveillance or potential infection obscures the beauty of exchange, both intentional and incidental. That’s a different story, and it’s an important one to tell. I can’t stop thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin, who wove that story—that we are, in a sense, inseparable from our containers—and called it a theory of carrier bags. For her, a carrier bag is part of what it means to be human.

Since our origins as gatherers, humans have always been defined by our carrier bags. The provisions we pick up and trade for along the journey are what keep us safe, or provide sustenance, or acquire ritual significance some time in the future when the bag is opened up again. Everything we come across—nuts and berries or microbes or ideas—is aspirated up into the carrier bags that we depend on. Carrier bags tell a material story of where we’ve been; they are what enable us to live well, now and tomorrow.

And now, more than ever, during a moment of shock and crisis and exception, we should be thinking about what new things we are finding in our carrier bags, what we take up, and what we share as we come into contact with others.

This collection of short reflections is titled Provisions: Observing and Archiving COVID-19. Provisions, here, in two senses of the word. These essays document provisions, as supplies or equipment, and provisions, as exceptions or provisional actions.

To keep up the word-play, these are neither “pro” (as in expert, professional, official statements) nor “visions” (as in predictions). They are informal, short, written under tight time constraints. We asked the contributors to open up their carrier bags and share some of the things they’ve collected during the months of this collective crisis.

The provisions are diverse, reflecting different topics, different parts of the world, and different scopes, from global to local to personal. Although it is far from comprehensive, this collection brings a rich mix of carrier bags into contact with each other—and we hope that it will continue to grow. We invite you to open up your carrier bag, to submit anything you have come across that you find meaningful to our open aggregator for projects, inspirations, and ideas. Over the coming months, we will continue exploring digital, print, and in-person formats for sharing the work, and bringing it into contact with ever more people and places and uses.

Because that is the purpose, after all, of a carrier bag. To be opened up and consulted again in the future, in a moment of danger, or hunger, or storytelling.

In fact, some of the contributors describe how useful their own carrier bags have been, as resources for responding to the present moment. Audrey Tang shares lessons from the recent memory of SARS in Taiwan. Jaclyn Youngblood describes the utility of a cabinet of curiosities at the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the ways that their team has cobbled together ad-hoc interventions. Naomi Woo turns to Le Guin’s carrier bag theory herself, to describe the intimacy of collecting music, as a form of care for ourselves and for others, during a time when we cannot gather to experience music collectively.

Some contributors interpret today’s provisional actions and extensions with caution. Sean McDonald warns of going too far down paths of data collection and new technology construction without appropriate institutional yardsticks to measure our steps. Conversely, Lori Brown finds hope in the lessons that might be learned from stepping into the unknown—developing a feminist ethics of care, for example.

Some tell stories. Very real stories, as Kaviq Kaluraq’s beautiful and heartbreaking account of increasingly precarious life in Canada’s far north, balanced with the wonder of rediscovering its stark landscape. Others weave fictions—Andres Colmenares imagines the moment of opening a time-capsule letter (a beautiful, strange carrier bag!) one billion seconds in the future.

And these are just a few of the reflections. In other words, this provisional issue of The Site Magazine is a crossroads where very distant travelers have opened up their carrier bags. They have been vulnerable or shared wisdom or encouraged optimism. It is a place of contact, which, we hope, will mark each of us as we continue on.

Just like walking along a path by the Charles River, this collection is a way to recognize that we share space with others, and to become tangled up. That’s the story of recycled air, after all. There is only so much air out there, and we are all recycling it, with each other and with the great pneumatic pump of forests and oceans and microbes. If I take away nothing else from this moment it is that we are all inhaling what others exhale, and—whether we like it or not—the future we will inhabit is a common one. I will find myself together with the older couple, the baby, and the maskless work-caller, and I expect that this carrier bag of provisions will come in handy.

Author Bio:

Matthew Claudel is a designer, researcher and writer. He co-founded MIT’s designX program, where he was the Head of Civic Innovation and an instructor for four years. Matthew has co-authored two books, Open Source Architecture and The City of Tomorrow, and published articles in peer reviewed journals, book chapters and speculative fiction pieces – primarily surrounding the issues of technology, design, and cities. He holds a doctorate in Advanced Urbanism from MIT, where his work focused on the emerging practices of urban experimentation as they relate to civic value. In 2018, Matthew received the Rappaport Foundation’s Public Policy Fellowship to work with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics on strategies for place-based experimentation with civic technology. He was also a fellow with the McConnell Foundation’s “Cities for People” initiative, and is an International affiliate of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal at McGill University. Matthew served on the jury for the Canadian federal government’s $50M Smart City Challenge. He is a protagonist of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 89plus global community of artists, and a frequent collaborator with the strategic design firm Dark Matter Labs. As an undergraduate, he studied architecture at Yale, and received a Master of Science in Urban Studies from MIT.

The author wishes to thank Kim Smith her line drawings of carrier bags that have helped bring this project to life.
Instagram: @kimsmithstudio Website: kimsmithart.com