I, Like Many Things

In a world of change we cling to constants that comfort us while catastrophes lure behind cut corners. We compartmentalize and channel our focus into cones of concentration when confronted with choices. Many might decide to do so with intention while others simply try to cope with the complexities. While we are no strangers to change, this current historical conjuncture presents extremities and emergencies that invite conjecture on normalcy and its fragility, challenges to status quos and rapid adaptation to revised realities.As everyday life is turned on its head, the home remains a physical and metaphorical locus of our greatest aspirations and deepest anxieties. A performative and pervasive space where fictions become realities and rearranging furniture and fixtures constitutes political acts with planetary consequences. Today's dense time offers us glimpses of a myriad of hybridized and alternative modes of domesticity that demand our shared attention and careful critical inquiry before they are once again lost to routine.
I, Like Many Things is a story of contemporary life and architecture that begins with everyday domestic practices and the notion of "home" as a literal (and literary) space--a space which simultaneously structures and is structured by our relationship to each other and the world. To tell this story, twenty-six authors from far-flung fields and geographies collectively narrate four fluid chapters of a thick history of the present.
Across four chapters and three visual catalogs, I, Like Many Things presents anecdotal stories, fictions, academic research, poetry, and visual essays. One chapter explores nascent and invasive virtual worlds. Another hones in on ongoing ecological collapse and climate disaster. A third chapter finds ground in social movements and political organizing, while a fourth ponders selfhood, imagination, and the possibilities of "off-time." As timely distractions between chapters, catalogs present past inquiries by us and open call participants.
I, Like Many Things is for those to whom the pandemic was an exercise in spatial design. Those who consider themselves architects or designers and those who do not. Those of us who engage with, push back on, and negotiate the spaces we inhabit, consciously or unaware, expanding our collective field of action. I, Like Many Things insists on the critical interdependencies of all social, political, and environmental struggles, and attempts to maneuver ambiguities,