100,000 Folds: The Stabilizing Power of Community
Discovering essential collectives, networks, and ecosystems
Even before the pandemic, social capital in America had been declining, which some have attributed to our increasingly diverse society. People need places to meet, outside of their bubbles, where they feel welcome and safe, in order to form bonds and avoid tribalism. COVID has blocked our access to most physical meeting spaces, so our digital communities are more important than ever. Not surprisingly, women have traditionally been society’s community builders (at about 1:40), but consider what has happened to the demands on women over the past year.
In May 2020, Joanna Hutchinson felt powerless reading The New York Times piece An Incalculable Loss, the now-famous, full front-page death toll of US lives that had been lost to COVID-19 to that point. Like many of us, Joanna struggled with the sheer scale of 100,000 lives. She was burdened by overwhelming grief. Joanna is a certified public accountant, a data person. But she never thought of herself as a data visualizer — she doesn’t have a datafam. Instead, she found an outlet for her grief in an unusual collective, among the paper-folding community.
What started as a way of grappling with her own feelings became 100,000 Folds, a collaborative sculpture project to…
