The history of cities is the history of exchange. As much as it is an arrangement of architecture, the city is a series of networks by which people are moved from one location to another, via which commodities, real or merely conceptual, are transported. It is a place in which languages, ideas, identities are moved from one to another. These are the grounds for the formation of communities; where the familiar, the same, ‘I’ or ‘we’ meets the other and finds something that allows the boundary to slip, that includes ‘you’ in ‘us’ and ‘us’ in ‘you’. We make lives out of our narratives, out of narrative intersections with others. But these narratives are not the easy linear tales of fiction and the movies, with beginnings, middles and (happy) endings. The city is a spider-web of haphazard and willed encounters, a place of connections and dead-ends, and so are its narratives.

Marysa Dowling’s photographs, conceived on the simple basis of passing an object as radiantly banal as a bright blue plastic bag from one person to the next, maps a community. This is not a community that can say ‘we’ on the basis of shared identity or common culture. By the time the bag reaches the third or fourth pair of hands in the series, a stranger to the first recipient has taken hold of it. The bag traverses and establishes a community in which it is the only necessary, common element. Never passed on by hand, but ‘bounced back’ via the photographer with a set of instructions, it shows up in the images like a radar dot on a screen, moving around London, mapping its network. The bag is an object of communication and the object of communication, proliferating a surrounding correspondence of texts and emails between artist and others.

I’m struck by how many members of this ‘community’ insist on secrecy, using the bag as mask. They belong, yet they are unrecognisable. They become members of a community with a common interest – the simple task of moving and photographing the bag may stand in for other, more complex, goals – who remain strangers to each other and the wider public. It is, of course, one of the myths of urban society since the inception of industrial modernity that rather than being the chanced, chaotic movement of people, ideas and goods, that the city – and modernity – is governed by cabals or secret societies. We need, it seems, to believe that there is, somewhere, an ordering presence to the whole that can explain what is, beyond the limited intervention of public institutions, otherwise pure disorder. The master of this mythology is the French novelist Balzac, in his History of the Thirteen (1845). Looking at Dowling’s photographs, however, I’m reminded of a modern updating of the tale, by Jacques Rivette in his extraordinary film Out One, that in its meandering assumes the temporal and spatial dimensions of the city. There two paranoid innocents independently stumble across what they believe to be compelling evidence of conspiracy, and begin unravelling a network of strangers and friends that may, or may not, exist, that may, or may not have any compelling force in the world.

Here we have our own ‘thirteen’, a mystery society of the bag, of concealed identities amidst friendships; a network that, by chance ends with an acquaintance of this writer, unknown to the artist. What is its power in the world: against, say, the cabals of global capitalism, the hidden motivations of the secretariat? However small, even if they seem constrained within the institutionally approved registers of culture, the community is where such resistances, the narratives of ‘we others’, begin.