The X-Files Pilot introduces agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) stuffed away in a basement office. His research on weird and unexplained phenomena is considered unimportant, yet he is nevertheless kept on FBI's payroll. On Mulder's wall hangs an iconic poster, with a UFO picture accompanied by the text "I want to believe". Not a believer in actual aliens, but someone who wants to believe. I want to believe in something as elusive as extraterrestrials: an office of my own.
Office workers include academics, and as part of the academization of artists they too find themselves drawn to offices. One could say that an artist-academic must have an office of one’s own to think, dream, write and create. But more often than not, having an office is tied to a position of precarity.
In 2014 I made a series exploring Office Nostalgia, a longing for the workplace. In images natural wilderness were inserted into otherwise corporate perfection. The accompanying text was written from an outside position, in literal and metaphoric sense: “Now that I've stopped working. Or, I stopped going to work, but I'm still occupied, spending most of the days stretching, meditating or taking care of plants.” The subject of the text is at once liberated and afflicted by dislocation from the duties of the office.
When I resurrected the project in 2021, as the sequel Back 2 Work, the pandemic was resurging and lockdown was in effect. Longing for the office had mushroomed, from the agony of precarious artist-academics to a society-wide nostalgia. What was lacking from our newfound freedom to work-from-home?
We did not miss work, because it continued unabated. Meetings, managerial monologs and awkward co-worker small talk zoomed into our homes. I suggested that we missed the sense of importance of “putting on fancy clothes and going somewhere that requires key cards to get in and has plants that someone else waters, and floors that someone else cleans”. Lockdown revealed the value of a place that makes work feel different.
It is 2025 and my privileged fortune as a temporary senior lecturer has expired again. I am packing out my office at the Department of Media and Communications for the third time in a decade. Taking my plants, tea leaves and cups, books, pictures, games, ephemera, I am struck by the cryptic idea of Xylaria polymorpha growing in the office. Usually found underneath withering logs, its looks has made it known as “dead man’s fingers”. From underneath a filing cabinet, what resembles the fingers of a dead man reach out.
Fig 3. Mulder’s office in X-Files.
I Want to Believe (in an Office of My Own)
