HOW HAVE THE SPACES AND EXPERIENCES OF OUR HOMES CHANGED DURING THE PANDEMIC?

We ask people of all ages and backgrounds to share their experiences from the pandemic and specific ways living arrangements, domestic spaces, and relationships to the public transformed to facilitate alternative and supportive ways of living. We are collecting documentation in the form of photographs, writing, drawings, and any other way you can think of that captures the multiple ways our homes changed throughout the pandemic.

A bathroom with an exterior entrance for guests let us host guests and socialize outside.

HOW TO SHARE

We'd love to hear about your experiences and reflections! Please Share photographs, writings, drawings, (or anything you can think of) with an extended caption in one of the following ways...

Share and upload via this online form
Email us at share@publicdomestic.com
Tag or message us on Instagram: @publicdomestic

For your own privacy, unless instructed otherwise, we will not use your name or location in any exhibition or publication of this material.

WHAT TO CONSIDEr

How has daily life changed?

How has the pandemic changed your daily routine?
During the pandemic, how did your life change to manage family or caretaking responsibilities?
In what ways do you continue to engage with your communities, peers, family, and friends? Did you form closer relationships to anyone during the pandemic?
Were you able to help others during this time or how have you been helped by others? Has the pandemic made you aware of food, housing, job insecurities, or social injustices in new ways?

How have we changed our homes and domestic spaces?

What has become the most public zone of your home?
How did you modify your home in response to the way life changed during the pandemic?
Did you change your living space or use it differently to socialize with people over the past year and a half (inside or outside)?
In what ways did your living space provide comfort, strength, or distraction during the pandemic?
Are there any lasting changes to your home-life that were initiated as a response to the pandemic? If you could make changes to your home to adapt to the pandemic, what would they be?

WHY do we ask?

Two years ago, the global pandemic upended many of our lives, newly revealing evidence of social and economic inequality, and compounding personal and collective hardship. What in part distinguishes this period of sudden disruption from others in the past is that much of it has taken place, not in the public sphere, but the interior of our own private homes—leading to new conditions of life at home.

Our focus centers on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and mitigation measures on the domestic experience of populations in New Mexico. These stories will form the basis for a publication and exhibition on the changing conditions of living, radical systems of support, and new forms of resiliency in our homes. This project documents how hardship, mutual aid, solidarity, and collective innovations emerging from the global pandemic have reformatted the domestic interior for people in New Mexico and beyond.

We were lucky to have a long apartment to keep the entry distant from all other living areas. Anytime we came from the grocery store, we made sure to contain all shoes, coats, and bags at the door. We also had nearly no visitors during the pandemic, but we'd have many zoom hangouts all the time. This required us to curate and maintain the west end of the apartment as clean as possible. Which is a tricky thing to do when you're living room is also a makeshift living room, spare bedroom (when we were too lazy to climb the stairs), and zoom setting.

WHO's asking?

We're a group of students and faculty in the Architecture Department at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning. Public Domestics is led by Assistant Professors, Gabriel Fries-Briggs and Cesar A. Lopez, and is supported by Courteney Begay (M. ARCH 2023) and Marisa Trujillo (M.ARCH 2022). This project is funded by the 2021-2022 University of New Mexico's Center for Regional Studies Faculty Development Research Award.

Please get in touch at info@publicdomestic.com