Mourning le Temps Perdu (Proust 1988–1990): Eating Together in Pestilence

This creative piece of non-fiction was written in response to the challenges of everyday life in the early weeks of the pandemic in Australia. I wanted to convey the emotional economy of experiences—the longing, sense of loss, traces of guilt in processes of remembering and storytelling, particularly when these feelings might seem unjustified and self-indulgent.

A Borrowed Life: Introduction to the Great Dis-Equalizer—the COVID-19 Crisis

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COVID-19 Angst

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional physical, social, psychological reference points and perspectives, through immediate lockdown, discontinuity of supply, exacerbation of demand and the generation of fear, uncertainty and panic. The latter scenarios could be reframed and reviewed through a creative and poetic lens as the matrix for creative reinterpretation by highlighting the impacts of COVID-19 on space, time, mind, consciousness, emotions, thinking, and behaviour, as seen through ‘space implosion,’ ‘the matrix of creativity,’ ‘I and I,’ ‘technological kinship’ and ‘time explosion.’

Poetics in the Time of Pandemic. There is Always Going to be a Before and an After

Poetics in times of pandemic: There is always going to be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ This paper briefly explores a number of different themes affecting us as creatives living in lockdown in Sydney. Sharing our personal story of how we imagined our lives would be before COVID 19 and the changes we observed after entering in Pandemic mode. Intertwining images taken with a mobile phone and text, we offer our observations on the evolving new language that appears around us, in supermarkets, on walls and on the footpath. Signs determining social interactions and affecting behaviour day by day. We also touch on the idea of how writing can bring us home and make us feel closer to our languages and countries of origin. We mention the importance of the survival of theatre to tell stories from the time of the pandemic. Governments have been found wanting, due to lack of care of the most vulnerable people, in particular First Nations. We reflect on the need for reinvention accepting change and reassessing our human values bringing awareness about our links to the natural world. As the pandemic takes us from one stage to the next, for us there is one possible space of relief and hope. This is within the space of creativity, from here we can make sense of our new reality while contributing to a collective sense of humanity.

107 Days and Counting...

It has been roughly six months since my family and I started our quarantine in João Pessoa, Brazil, and to this day we are still at home trying to avoid physical proximity with people from outside. As Italian immigrants (proudly not “expats”) in Latin America, we experienced two main phases of the Covid-19 global crisis: in March and April, with shock and despair, we were following the daily death bulletins coming from Italy; from May onwards, the progressive easing of the situation in Italy coincided with the escalation of contagions and deaths in Brazil. In this essay, written from one of the current epicentres of the pandemic, I draw upon Achille Mbembe and Denise Ferreira da Silva in order to reflect both on the necropolitical governmental machine that literary seems to extract pleasure from this sustained tragedy, and on the self-destructive colonial logic that inscribes the ongoing trivialisation of deaths in Brazil. I discuss the self-inflicted racialised logic that makes such a reasonment possible and diffused, as well as the multiple layers of whiteness and privilege that permit the naturalisation and oblivion of these deaths both from internal (Euro-descendant) and external points of view. I conclude the essay by making reference to my track 107 jorna (107 days), written on the last 1 July (and to be premiered online by the Glasgow-based Lights Out Listening Group), where I combine Sicilian speech and electronic noise in order to articulate my own astonishment, impatience and indignation with the current situation.

Pleas Through a Glass

A poem to give voice to struggle and to humanize faces behind the shields erected during the pandemic.

Who are you? What do you do? What do you bring? A florin!

My contribution consists in some ethnographic notes taken by a freelance cultural anthropologist living in Turin (capital of Piedmont, in the North-West, one of the regions most affected by Covid19) on the situation of the pandemic in Italy as seen with a very informal participant observation. After a very short chronicle of the lockdown, useful to set the different phases of the lockdown in Italy and the timing of the events, I write about the many issues faced by Italian citizens in the period, from inequality in living the pandemic to grassroots initiatives to answers it, from reclusion conditions in a variety of contexts (house, prisons, retirement houses) to strategies to get out anyway (for good reasons), from stereotypes Italian are (sometimes correctly) perceived abroad to the misunderstanding of the instruction of personal distancing, from the concept of family to that of community. All this reporting my same participation to some initiatives and actions, introducing my reflections and moreover witnessing the irony we used to face the fear.

CROWN Crónica

This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish called ‘CROWN Crónica’ stems ...

Privilege, Precarity and the Epistemic and Political Challenge of COVID-19

Much of my initial shock at lockdown was the result of a loss of privilege. As a middle class professional working mother and a transnational scholar, I have constructed a life based on movement and freedom. Yes, I have ties that bind me: I am a single parent and a recent migrant to London, meaning my support network is somewhat limited. But with money I have been able to secure childcare and my career has allowed me to live simultaneously across three countries on three continents. So suddenly being locked in a small flat in London with restricted movement and full-time working and caring responsibilities was unsurprisingly an intensely traumatizing experience (reflected in my blog piece for the Feminist Review – https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/resisting-the-violence-of-common-sense/). As the weeks have turned into months, my points of focus have shifted. On the one hand it has become much clearer to me that it was losing the illusion of constantly ‘moving forward’ that I was mourning: of not being able to escape, feel a sense of momentum and freedom, of planning and anticipating future adventures. On the other, as the world began to reopen slowly, I also became much more conscious of how being ‘locked down’ had actually been a privilege in itself. Not everyone had that luxury. Both in my local setting of south east London and in my research ‘fieldsite’ of Sri Lanka, it became clear that many had not been able to secure themselves at home – ordering food (and anything else they desired!) delivered to their door, avoiding all forms of public transport, working from home, doing home renovation, youtube workouts and taking up new hobbies. Reflecting on the question of privilege from these two angles, I wonder how the COVID-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. For many elites we see ourselves as the vanguard of struggles. Yet our impatience with the present (let alone the past!), reliance (conscious or not) on ideas of progress and experience of constant movement makes us ill-equipped to sit in an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. Do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time? Meanwhile the realities of extremely disadvantaged and marginalised people are that they have never had the luxury of relying on a social, political and economic system to support them. As a result, while they have often been terribly affected, they have not been shocked that they would be affected. Instead they have found (sometimes subversive) ways to survive and organize, developed informal networks of support and creative forms of resilience. With this in mind, how might we rethink which agents and whose knowledge might be most valuable in this moment when trying to articulate responsive and transformative politics and practices? How might this allow for a richer understanding of not only the experience but also the possible responses to the precarity that has become a dominant contemporary reality? And how might new epistemic and political practices emerge that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order?

Respirare il tempo: Re-Azioni di superamento COVID-19

The current work retraces the experience of 'Mirabilia', an online project originated at the beginning of the Italian lockdown (March 2020) by a spontaneous group made up of researchers from different disciplines, which had the purpose of showing human creativity and their ability to find strategies for survival and ways to cope with adversity. In particular, the paper illustrates the virtual exhibition created by Mirabilia "The breath of time": through a public call, many images and narrations of personal and particularly significant objects were collected during the quarantine.