One World Together at Home (2020)
‘One World Together at Home’ charts our renewed sense of community and our shared humanitarian condition during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The points of departure are the following questions posed by Judith Butler: “[W]hat sense of world and liveable life emerges when the prohibition on touch is one way of safeguarding another’s life as well as one’s own? And what sense do we make of care when healthcare workers safeguard the lives of those who are ill by taking on a potentially lethal viral load? To what extent is touching/being touched breathing each other’s air part of the embodied and social life-world that now inverts in the name of a politics of life?”
Home quarantined in Italy, I have set out to utilize a computational process to compress footage coming from the social media, and documenting expressions of solidarity and compassion across the globe, into single digital images. They range from clapping to the healthcare workers, to community singing from balconies, to appeals to stay home so as to slow down the spread of the infection. These expressions formed a shared vocabulary of solidarity for the countries hit by the pandemic, which shows that what we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart, for better or for worse.
The resulting visuals are footage distilled into minimal palettes, and arranged into aestheticizing compositions. Bridging geographies and levelling details of secondary importance, these traces of solidarity reaffirm how our illness can become wellness.
– “When “i” is replaced with “we” even illness becomes wellness.” – Malcolm X
