“…in our current moment of rupture, where neoliberal norms are crumbling, we have a rare opportunity. Awareness of our systemic carelessness across all social hierarchies has begun to appear everywhere. Let’s begin by avowing care, in all of its ubiquitous complexities, and by building more enduring and participatory caring outlooks, contexts and infrastructures, wherever we can.” – The Care Manifesto, care collective.
In times of abrupt change, intimate contact and communication reveal themselves as an essential means of psychological survival. The words and terms ‘isolate’, ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’, ‘unprecedented’ and so on proliferated in our vernacular, contributing to a perceived and refreshing sense of collective experience. Together, we learned day by day what this global pandemic meant. Together, we talked, hoped and mourned for our loved ones. Together, for a short time, we halted in our tracks. This collection of audio-visual works is the result of Finnegan Travers archiving the voice notes and phone calls privately received over a 4-month period from March to June of the year 2020.
The audio files were then collaged into sound pieces by Alf Brooks. Over the following summer, Finn Travers filmed material and edited it together with the sound pieces. Although there was a perceived collective experience, it is clear that people’s experience of the coronavirus pandemic varied greatly depending on economic stability, personal health and entrenched racial inequality, amongst many other factors. These collections of videos are by no means an attempt at portraying any kind of universal experience. The voice notes that make up the contents of these pieces are a small cross section of friends and family of the artists. Nonetheless, the pieces serve as a crystallisation of emotions and feelings that were felt of a time that caused a huge rupture to the established order. In their existence, these pieces serve as a window on a time that is loaded with potential, meaning and motivation for change.
Video - Finnegan Travers
Audio - boniface