Hello, I'm Tatevik, doing my second year in Animation
I'm still stuck in Rotterdam because of the uncertainty with school schedules and airplanes, however I use my time for relaxing, making art, and making sure all my friends and relatives are doing well :')
1) I started making collages
2) Got to learn a lot about armenian cuisine and my mom's cooking tips (takes hours but I finally have the time!)
3) Got actually interested in cultural theories while working on my theory essay for days
Despite the models of safety that are represented by the bourgeois dream of nuclear family homeownership and the US foreign policy that reflects it, togetherness and care are much more important than the kind of security that depends on fencing out the whole world.
“Social distancing” must not mean total isolation. We won’t be safer if our society is reduced to a bunch of atomized individuals. That would neither protect us from the virus nor from the stress of this situation nor from the power grabs that capitalists and state authorities are preparing to carry out.
Form an affinity, form a network. Security culture—the practice of establishing a set of shared expectations to minimize risk
If the pandemic goes on long enough, we will probably see more automation—self-driving cars pose less threat of infection to the bourgeoisie than Uber drivers—and the displaced workers will be divided up between the repression industries (police, military, private security, private military contractors) and precarious workers who are forced to take on great risk to make a few pennies. We’re accelerating into a future in which a digitally connected privileged class performs virtual labor in isolation while a massive police state protects them from an expendable underclass that takes most of the risks.
It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors
of identity (race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera)
inform how we experience and consider the world, but
what is significant in intersectionality is that that place
holding happens in different ways at different times and
for different reasons.
Often we feel trapped in one system, and we feel the system is so much
larger than we are; but we are the ones who are keeping
that system going.
More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival of-
the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a
lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera.
The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such
a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be
considered successful.
One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful
is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It
actually removes the clutches of that form of control over
self and control over body and labor.
Sometimes the self-awareness
may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is
enough to create a mindful balance.
Rizmi, Uzma. “Decolonization as Care.”
Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide: Capitalism in Crisis—Rising
Totalitarianism—Strategies of Resistance:
I have a habit of taking screenshots when people text something I find memorable/interesting/sweet, so I collected all my screenshots from this period that are about feelings/quarantine activities and made a collage!
Since I didn't mention an example, I'm actually wondering of an example of a collaborative life project. How to implement all the tools and networks practically? Another question is about making it work in a complex, multicultural society, where collaboration itself is an obstacle + what would be the relationship with individualistic onthology, what would be the predicted clashes?
Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence,
Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press
Books, 2018.
* Up until this point all the exercises I did were before my resit, so from the 4th one the situation of my lockdown changed as well as the content accordingly
exercise 5
exercise 6,7
I grouped with Maya for the resit period. After all these months of isolation it was refreshing to work together again.
Since the lockdown was basically over for her, while I was already back in Armenia in a full quarantine, we couldn’t relate the COVID isolation of April anymore. First, we had the idea of doing a projection mapping and sharing thoughts of people on buildings, so basically having the contrast of small bits of personal thoughts on big, uncomfortable spaces. This took us to a conversation about our current situations, and we realized that, in a way, we have similarities in our background: some current political heat, the socialist past, a lot of abandoned spaces.
We thought it’s more relevant and more open (educational, why not) to combine our current situations, common historical past and connect our project to it.
Also, we noticed how the quarantine detached people from the world, as everyone was literally interacting with their own close, small environment (room, laptop screen), so we wanted to create a space where people could just share simple images from their lives and see, learn what life is like in other parts of the world.
We thought of making collages with all these scenes/buildings and distribute it as posters around with short texts about human survival/class struggle/social conditions, however, not in a very sophisticated way.
For collecting images and sharing with people, we thought opening an Instagram and taking people’s submissions of places they live in, or just images from their city that mean something to them. This could be an Instagram page for instance. That would also allow to create a network and share personal images of scenery, to make these collective images (collages) and talk about really simple, human actions and encourage humans to share their visual environments with each other and think about questions, especially after/during a pandemic that has made us question a lot.
Our audience is every citizen, every person who evern walks around or just wonders how people further than they are living.