Pandemico

A journey into pandemic emotions. Fears, desires, presences and absences are at the center of this six-handed study, born from reflections and improvisation in a Lisbon interior.

The subject of this collective research is the impact of the pandemic on affects and the body. Body and affects are seen here as concepts and emotions deeply affected by the social and planetary transformations generated by the long-lasting and deadly acceleration of something called neoliberal capitalism, of which the ongoing pandemic is only one of the latest outcomes, together with the uncertainties and further
vulnerabilities generated by the omen of a recurrent viral catastrophe.

The voice that accompanies the present photographic story is situated, individual, and collective at the same time: it represents a viewpoint, an
emotional tangle that reflects the lonely experience of one of us who is also and immediately in relationship with the others, and in the absence of the Other. This point of view is provided here in a circular time lapse, as the pandemic overflows the boundaries between past, present, and future, it brings memory in the realm of dreams and filters emotions through fears of the End and loneliness.

Texts: Gaia Giuliani/Paolo Gorgoni

** http://europeansouth.postcolonialitalia.it/journal/2020-7/1.Giuliani-Gorgoni-Avanzato.pdf**

What lies beyond the eyes: a night swallows the next, in weeks that last a day, in hours that last months. Spit what I can’t keep within, in soft swirls. Stay inside, drown there.

I imprinted the shapes of your body on a veil so that I can touch them when nobody sees me.
Suspended in memory while still alive, you are a Shroud on screen, AD 2020.

Heat passes through surfaces. Our curtain will be thin, so that every spark becomes a warm
halo with your features. And so that you can caress me before your arms grow cold.

Will it be elastic enough, resistant enough, aseptic enough, safe enough?
At most, it’ll guide us through crossings we’ve been unaware of.

Let’s get back into the Russian doll: in the beginning there was the
plastic-wrapped candy, then came the blowjob with a condom, then, finally, we
decided that skin itself was just too dangerous. How many layers are left
between the inside and the outside?

No place is harder to reach than here, now. In fact, we haven’t even set foot there yet.

Thigh or chest? We are under the sheath like skin underneath a layer of hot wax: if you tear it off properly, it only hurts for a second. We will do it slowly, one millimetre at a time, in the most inefficient and painful way.

They bring us to the table. Together.
They will eat us wrapped, without even chopping us up.
Not that it matters, since we’re not here.

We are all alone, see?