Throughout the pandemic I’ve been struck by the feeling that my adopted home of Chicago and the fact of my living here has become almost irrelevant to my daily existence. The things that make it a world class city have become off limits or even inaccessible in many cases. The significance of place has become a kind of myth, a fiction, and my sense of place has been localized to my apartment and the handful of shops I go to for necessities.

If The Forgotten Openness of the Closed World was an introspective meditation on the nature of time, then The City Is a Lie We Tell Ourselves is an interrogation of the concept of place, specifically in these times. What does it mean to call any particular pin on the map “home” at this moment, when we are connected more by wires and electricity than any common civic purpose? Every place has become a non-place, each apartment simultaneously part hotel room, part office, part cafe. The city bares its veins only on trips for essentials or walks through ice.
-- Ryan