All eyes have been on the coronavirus since it crept up in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. According to the latest reports by the World Health Organization, the pandemic has sickened more than 528 million people worldwide. Today, at least 6 million people have died, and the virus has been detected in nearly every country. But with so many statistics and information elsewhere, we wanted to approach a different level of perspective from this global pandemic. We interviewed children from Italy, China, Honduras, Egypt, and Sweden – where each country faces different regulations and confinement methods. We asked the same questions to each of the children interviewed; the geopolitical background of the children dramatically influenced their perceptions of the pandemic and restrictions. In this case, the gaze towards infancy becomes a powerful tool and method of analysis, allowing deconstructions of dominant narratives, oðcial historiographies and dichotomies, such as those between the rational and irrational, universal and individual (particular), natural and cultural. Some examples of the questions: "If coronavirus could be an animal, which animal do you think coronavirus would be?", "What is the thing you missed the most during quarantine?", " If masks could talk or make a sound, how would it sound?"
It takes on the challenge to follow some of the working methodologies indicated by Agamben and translate those to the realm of aesthetics and visual arts. Here the two poles – infancy and history – become intertwined reference terms that circumscribe the field of our research and provide the ground for a possible experimental critical approach.
- AUTHORS: Albert Hellman / Sofia Baldi Pighi / Gabriela Castro / Ran
- Tang