Store it in a Cool Place: Basements as Social Machines

Abstract

This article discusses the role of basements in the settlement of relationships, allowing the possibility of editing of one’s own life and testing multiple sides of the self. Hence, it contests the accounts that present storing as a negatively coded process and basements as merely containers to be filled. After conducting ethnographic research in 37 cellars located in the liminal region of Eastern Estonia, I argue for the need to go beyond the understanding of storage spaces as passive repositories, and instead approach them as technologies of the meantime, with a relational impact and a future orientation. A basement allows us to keep old things and past ideas in the dark, for a while. In doing so, it facilitates the sorting of different relationships to people, places and events. Hence, one has to go down to understand how things upstairs fully are.