Cynthia Deng and Elif Erez are interdisciplinary designers, hailing from New Haven and Istanbul respectively.

Their collective work spans installations, stories, workshops, and speculative infrastructures. They think and work through narratives, temporal multiplicities, and situated standpoints with a reparative lens prioritizing social and ecological care.

They have been collaborating since 2017, when they were part of a team that was awarded the Harvard Mexican Cities Initiative fellowship for the project “Tracking Trash”.

Most recently, they presented their pair thesis, “Care Agency: A 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair,” at the GSD.

Cynthia is currently an architecture faculty member at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Querétaro, and is a dual degree graduate of the Master of Architecture and Master of Urban Planning programs. Elif is currently an architectural designer at Studio Gang Architects in New York, and is a dual degree graduate of the Master of Architecture and Master of Design Studies (Narratives) programs.

Both earned their B.A. in Architecture from Yale University.

Their speculations on waste, materials, care, and maintenance have been published in Log, Harvard Urban Review, and Disc Journal.


CV


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We call our collection of collaborative work bags, borrowing from Ursula LeGuin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to celebrate the bag as holder of many worlds and nonlinear narratives. We would like to think of bags as a multivalent, nonlinear container of our work.