A seemingly mundane object that is the bearer of one's subsistence—all your groceries, garments, knick-knacks and many worldly woes—becomes a container of tales, of resistance and multitudes in Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative fiction. The first endeavour of human 'invention' was a bag to carry grains and fruits; not the spear or axe that pierced hides, headed tribes and started wars, she states. Care has always been an act of assimilating, carrying and containing: people, perspectives, narratives and ideas. The solitary hero who lived to tell a violent tale is an abject absence in this text.

And so, do away with the primitivity of the phallic and welcome the nurture of the womb; do away with the missiles and pointy things for tents and refuges. Do away with sagas to make way for stories we all tell around the fireplace. Do away with state lines and make space for, space?

“If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes,” said Agnès Varda. And thus was the very land and the being that walked it, a container, a carrier bag. This week's dispatch is a sack of similar ideas of reclamation and counteracts: from Regner Ramos' 'Cüirtopia' and its counter-mapping for a queer agency in the Caribbean to Will Scholey's garden designs that hold infinite smaller containers (biomes); from Olivia Broome's 'Brutalist Plants' documenting the essential act of reclamation in eco-brutalism to Suchitra Mattai's installations chronicling feminist labour, migration, and future diasporas as carrier bags of our present history.

This week, we invite you all to be carrier bags—unshapely, torn at the seams, and bursting with objects and needs—but with room for just one more.