Confounding Containment
Location
We’ll visit the Center for Book Arts — 28 West 27th Street (Manhattan), 3rd Floor — for a box-making workshop (3:30 to 5:30pm) with Maria Pisano (thanks to Corina Reynolds and the CBA for helping to organize!); we’ll then hang around until 6pm to discuss.
Agenda
Last week we considered how we might contain — or intentionally fail to confine! — our collective explorations of misfittery in a publication. This week we think more about the various boxes — intellectual, institutional, physical, technological — into which we stuff and through which we sort our ideas. We might consider the Wardian cases into which natural scientists fit plant specimens for transport to herbaria, the cells of a database, standard archival boxes and card catalog drawers, compression algorithms, bespoke boxes for collection items that simply won’t fit into anything else — and even boxes that manifest the uncontainability of their contents! Book artist Maria Pisano will share her own work and lead us through a box-making workshop, where we’ll feel the frictions of containment.
To Prepare for Today
- Consider the role of boxes in colonial collection: Think back to our NYBG visit as you either read Luke Keogh’s “The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved the Plant Kingdom,” Arnoldia (May 17, 2017) OR watch his lecture, “The Wardian Case: A Simple Box that Moved Plants and Changed the World,” Linnean Society (July 15, 2021) [video: stop at 42:05]. Moss was often used as packing material in transport — one species serving as mere buffer to another, more charismatic species! (See Elaine Ayers’ work below, in the Supplemental Resources.)
- Optional: Consider the role of boxes in consumer capitalism, globalization, and geo-engineering: Shannon Mattern, “World in a Box,” Places Journal (May, 2024).
- Consider how boxes facilitate organization and preservation in the archives: Read Region of Peel Archives’s “How Do Archivists Package Things? The Battle of the Boxes,” Peeling the Past (September 10, 2024).
- What if a museum (or library) were a huge assemblage of boxes? Read Will Jennings, “V&A East Storehouse Is a Thrilling Meta-Museum for the Future,” Recessed Space (May 30, 2025). Will’s September interview with one of the museum’s designers and one of its curators is fascinating, but it’s also long; if you’ve got time, I recommend checking out Allin, Cormier, and Jennings in the Supplemental Resources below!
- Can box-making be an artform or a philosophical practice? You’re damn right it can! Read Nick Haramis, “Boxes Almost as Valuable as What They Contain,” T: The NY Times Style Magazine (April 22, 2025). Check out more examples!:
- Browse through Maria Pisano’s website and skim the “Conservation Enclosures” class she recently taught at CBA. Check out Barbara Mauriello’s “The World of Boxes” Summer 2024 CBA extravaganza, too.
- See how our colleague Amanda Belantara and A.M. Alpin transform the card catalog into a wondrous portal in their Rule No. 5 installation at NYU’s Bobst Library!
- Explore Aspen, the magazine-in-a-box: “Aspen Magazine: A Surprise Box of Delights,” AnOther (March 31, 2015).
- Three Star Books and Black Mass Publishing take Aspen to the next level: publication as formal and material improvisation. Watch Three Star Books x Black Mass Publishing (2025) [video: 3:38]; see spreads here.
Fieldwork Documentation
Supplemental Resources
- Alexander Albarro, “Inside the White Box: Aspen 5+6,” Artforum (September 2001).
- David Allin, Brendan Cormier, and Will Jennings, “A Conversation About V&A Storehouse with Architect David Allin & Curator Brendan Cormier,” Recessed Space (September 1, 2025).
- Elaine Ayers, “Three Inches Deep of Wet Moss,” Lecture, Columbia University (September 21, 2022).
- Elaine Ayers, “Glittering Emeralds and Humid Science: Bryology in Boxes and Value Transformation Across the Indian Ocean” in “Strange Beauty: Botanical Collecting, Preservation, and Display in the Nineteenth Century Tropics,” Dissertation, Princeton University (2019): 20-50.
- Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, and Maria Rentetzi, eds., Boxes: A Field Guide(Mattering Press, 2020).
- Swati Chattopadhyay, “Unarchiving: Toward a Practice of Negotiating the Imperial Archive,” PLATFORM June 5, 2023).
- Jonathan P. Eburne, “The Orgone Box” in Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2025): 25-58.
- Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
- Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929, trans. Peter Krapp (MIT Press, 2011).
- Hilary T. Seo and Tanya Zanish-Belcher, “Square Pegs, Round Holes: Thinking Creatively About Housing and Storage,” Archival Issues 30:1 (2006).