Viral Atmospheres: Maneuvering the Affective Geographies of Pandemics and Health.

SERRATED EDGES – within the framework of the Summer School 'Viral Atmospheres’

SERRATED EDGES is conceived as a poetic-minimalist choreography that engages with existential questions about the fragility, mutability, and resilience of human existence and the body – questions that appear particularly relevant in the context of pandemic experiences, collective crises, and affective geographies.

SERRATED EDGES evokes the duality of the body—in its presence and in its absence, through its movements and gestures, through images, words, sounds, whispers, screams, lamentations, laughter, and silence. At the beginning, there are four people, trapped in repetitive movements. Eventually, the animated still life begins to crack open; new paths lead from the margins to the here and now, from darkness into brightness. What is shared forms and deforms, and is repeatedly torn apart—as if cut by the serrated edges of a blade. These cuts run through movement, voices, bodies, lives.

In a timeless time, four creatures drift through contemplative spaces—mourning, struggling, hoping—in search of light, of orientation, of redemption, in the face of unresolved conflicts and the violence of human history and the present, which is always also their own. Like other works by LUNA PARK, this piece stands for the intention to interweave life and art, fiction and reality, social critique and dance aesthetics.

Cartographic Feelings of Vulnerable Geobodies: Maps and Mappings in Post-Covid Life.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, the coronavirus cartographic dashboard developed by Johns Hopkins University became a companion of our life, along with myriads of charts, maps and geo-visualizations. Such maps and mappings have concerned infected geobodies at different scales, from the planetary level to that of nation-states, from delimited red zones to the bodies of individual subjects locked down in quarantine. Taken collectively, such viral cartographies were not just aimed at monitoring and informing about the virus or the mobility restrictions, but acted as emotional amplifiers of an uncomfortable condition, giving an affective direction to the story we were experiencing.

How has such virality and vitality demonstrated by cartography during the pandemic impacted the post-Covid era? Beyond the experience lived during the pandemic, the memory of those feelings of vulnerability in cartographic form seems to persist in our present. This is the case with the many archives and atlases produced, which assume the function of a "memento". But, in addition to memory, cartography also becomes the bearer of certain practices inherited from the pandemic crisis. This is a legacy that tends to extend beyond the purely health/epidemiologic aspect to affect other spheres of existence. A particularly salient example is the practices of crowd control, for instance in tourism contexts, where space reservation and the prefiguration of its occupation in cartographic form has become mainstream. Through a geosemiotic approach, one could also map the legacy of the pandemic based on the intentional or inertial survival of prevention signs in material space, as well as other types of manifestations, such as street art, which are alternatively maintained or removed depending on the desire to communicate or not a prolonged atmosphere of vulnerability.

Through what selection processes does pandemic visual cultures continue or not to permeate our public spaces? In what ways do pandemic-related sensations blur and overlap with sensations of danger, anxiety or need for preparedness associated with new and different crises of the present (for example, wars or crime)? In what ways do viral feelings of vulnerability persist in space to convey new messages? Maps and metaphorical figures of mapping can help us explore these emotional territories.

Barometric Bodies. Mapping uncertainty from a first-person perspective.

When the COVID pandemic closed down cultural institutions in the spring of 2020, my colleague Marina and I found ourselves locked in a flat for two months tasked with making a web video series on „the current situation“ for a state theater. Unprepared, underequipped, and overwhelmed, we had to intuit artistic sensemaking while trying to get a grip on what was happening.

We set out to map the conditions and affective trajectories of the status quo by superimposing our selves with two characters exaggerating our own averageness. „Sandra and Heiko“ would be the neatly gendered German couple locked in togetherness that was meant to be our frame for exploring the affordances of a mediatized pandemic. We installed an always-on surveillance camera, a greenscreen, plenty of digital equipment, and ourselves. While there was a lot going on to play with, we had to operate out of a general numbing tension: between heightened awareness for bodies-as-danger and ubiquitous media technology as a means of (dis/re)embodying presence; between our liberalized distributed subjectivities and the suddenly much more tangible State as a normalizer of emergency, between shifting notions of „inside“ and „outside“.

The conditions we were working under did not favor producing a concise work of art, but rather a bricolage of formats, rhythms, and relationalities trying to capture the various ways of coping and sensemaking that were „in the air“. The discursively dominating themes were distance, transmission, and infection: atmospheric issues that we somehow needed to channel through our bodies – the very bodies filming, acting, and editing our footage. We moved between home computer work, physical exercise, Zoom calls, drinking tea, gaming, political telegram groups, sewing, gun practice, more computer work, a looming burnout, and the beginnings of a nationwide protest movement against pandemic restrictions that culminated in a run on the German parliament building a year later but started just then outside of a Berlin theater, 20 minutes on foot from our flat.

Using what we produced back then as an example, I want to think about artistic research practice configuring bodies as conduits. The ambiguous bystander, the unreliable witness, the defecting agent – conduits processing the present as un/knowable, making it il/legible to others and themselves – as virtual contact traces, viral politics, affective broadcasting, distributed selfhoods, absent flesh, and the slimy now.