In the teen-cinema classic Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the leading men are damned to spend eternity in hell after being murdered by evil robot clones of themselves. Bill and the equally clueless Ted whiz through purgatory, heaven, and hell in a contemporary version of Dante’s trilogy, encountering the Devil, God, and an unusually sympathetic Death. Eventually they manage to con their way out of hell by challenging Death to duels of Twister and Battleship.

One scene in particular has stayed with me since I first saw the film at age 10. Bill and Ted find themselves at the top of a narrow corridor with a series of doors. As they are forced to open each one, they are confronted with memories of past bad behavior that contributed to them ending up in hell. These memories materialize as terrifying nightmares; they relive adolescent boot camp, are chased by an evil Easter bunny, and are forced to kiss a witchlike grandmother.

In the past 16 years I’ve racked up my own catalog of questionable deeds and regrets. The idea of skeletons in the closet is something most of us can relate to. We tend to keep our memories, good and bad, alive via the storage of objects. Possibly to give clues to future generations about the past, or simply because we have trouble letting go, we accumulate more and more. We do not want to face these things on a daily basis, but it is satisfying to know that they exist, and they seem more reliable than memory, which is prone to distortion and forgetfulness.

The self-storage unit can thus be thought of as a kind of purgatory, or holding cell, for such objects. The five-story brick Metro Self-Storage building at 300 Treat Avenue in San Francisco is almost beautiful, especially compared to the sparkling-new but soulless self-storage compound across the street. The building has a rich history emblematic of its neighborhood. Once a garment factory, it witnessed the rise and fall of an internet startup, then recently became a self-storage facility, addressing the needs of people living in the area who are unable to fit their belongings into the notoriously small yet expensive houses and apartments. The interior has charm, with hardwood floors, exposed brick walls, and rows upon rows of storage units.

The space was ideal for Curatorial Industries as a site for Self-Storage. We did not have a place on campus to do our thesis show, and our budget was limited; we were able to negotiate a two-month rental for very little money. The unit was large enough to house the boxes, a desk for the librarian, and tables for visitors to sit at. The grated ceiling allowed us to install track lighting and our particular unit had a lot of natural light. The installation took barely two hours and was disassembled just as quickly. The site specificity of the project was offset by the notion that it could be reassembled at any other self-storage location. Similar libraries could be locked away in other such buildings across the world.

During the exhibition there was often no one around. The units remained quietly shut, their “eyelids” closed, like hibernating animals. Wandering through the labyrinth one couldn’t help wondering what secrets it contained. Occasionally someone would come by and open their unit, revealing piles of trash, furniture, excess stock, or cryptically marked boxes. Every self-storage unit contains a sort of cabinet of curiosities made up of disparate objects. These objects construct a narrative told by their owner through a process of sorting and cataloging. A librarylike system seemed a natural structure for us to adopt, and we embraced an aesthetic of standardization. From the press release and postcards to the index and system of checking out the boxes, we employed strict guidelines. These in many ways directed our actions and the actions of visitors.

The library as a universal ordering system is the subject of The Library of Babel, a short fictional text by Jorge Luis Borges originally published in 1941.* Borges proposes the idea of a universe that is an endless series of libraries, each identical in structure, with strictly unvarying architecture and content:

The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: 20 bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first—identical, in fact, to all.

Some elements of Borges’s library feel strangely similar to the structure of Self-Storage. Metro Self-Storage’s many identical units seemed endless, lacking any markers of uniqueness other than their painted-on numbers. The emphasis on standardization was something that we played upon in our press and promotional materials. The decision to use bankers’ boxes was inspired by their simplicity and basic architecture. Standardization orders the world symbolically, using systems to direct behavior and guide understanding. Borges’s library enforces uniformity down to the number of letters on each page:

Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds 32 books identical in format; each book contains 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, approximately 80 black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say.

Standardization, however, is related primarily to appearance, whereas the content in both Self-Storage and Borges’s library ranges from the familiar to the random, surprising, and disconnected. Like a shelf extracted from Borges’s library, Self-Storage held 30 boxes that were identical in structure, but each one held something completely unique, produced by a different artist or archivist. Borges’s text emphasizes this duality of chaos versus structure, the two living harmoniously in continued repetition, each book containing words and letters that may or may not refuse to make sense:

For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of endless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “vain and superstitious habit of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one’s hand.”)

The volumes in Borges’s library collectively contain everything in the universe: all possible combinations of letters and words in all possible languages, much of it having no logic or reason. Self-Storage was, in a sense, this library’s chance replication, or phantom limb. The 30 bankers’ boxes contained a unique combination of things, none of which were repeated. Each box acted as its own storage unit—a miniature version of the space in which it was shelved. We had instructed the artists and archivists to be attentive both to the physical structure of the box and to what it meant to put something in a box. Each one approached the idea differently, some taking these instructions into careful consideration, some completely ignoring them.

By putting away memories, evidence of our existence to be discovered later on, we in effect store ourselves. We actively choose objects that narrate a particular version of our lives. To a stranger, or even to ourselves years down the road, the story may seem strange, and it certainly changes over time. We keep objects because we rely on their infallibility, but they are really only as constant as our understanding of them.

* Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), 112–18.