Paper short abstract:

Corona Haikus project was a response to the lockdowns and to the shock, to the fear of the unknown and to the need to create a space to be together and to feel connected. The proposition was simple: three images and a short Japanese poetic haiku text on the experience of lockdown.

Paper long abstract:

Corona Haikus project was a response to the lockdowns that were being imposed around the globe and to the subsequent impossibility to continue life as it had been planned. A response to the shock, to the fear of the unknown and to the need to create a space to be together and to feel connected. The proposition was simple: three images and a short text on the experience of lockdown. It draws from the old Japanese poetic haiku structure.

It represents snippets of daily life, diverse and overlapping realities of the human experience of living through a pandemic lockdown. What the observer finds in Curated experiences, are ways into the labyrinth of the haikus gallery that allows to browse without getting lost, to be a flaneur and to follow someone else’s guidance.

Catharsis, emotions, interaction, storytelling, location, space and time are very interesting pillars in Corona Haikus Project. Cyberspace is the space of communication and interaction. Participants share their stories and communicate with each other simultaneously since in virtual space geography limitations no longer exist. Time is an interesting concept and it inspires rhetorical questions such as: Is time linear or cyclical? A debate that exists since Plato and Aristotle.

It has been an invitation to look to the world around us with new eyes, to detect the essence and the multiple interpretations of familiar objects, nature, light, colours and even daily routines. The project reached 1100 members from around the world who have embraced it and participated actively. https://coronahaikus.com/

Paper short abstract:

This presentation applies Hito Steyerl's conceptualisation of politics of verticality to photographic praxis.

Paper long abstract:

While in a harsh lockdown, staring from the 10th floor window at essential workers and participating in the policing of people's bodies felt like an experiment in politics of verticality (Steyerl, 20135), a person's gaze substituting that of drones and cameras. As I had adjusted to the views from outside my windows and balconies, staring down on capitalist farming failure expand to enclosed parks, public spaces and other commons, I was trying to engage creatively, or better say productively, with the situation and taking pictures from my balcony mimicking a previous blog I had. This time, however, the politics of representation and aesthetics were different. The financial struggles of the Albanian population became way more visible and a sort of reawakening came through the whole society regarding the gravity of the problem. As I engaged with the happy numerous return of swallows in my apartment windows in a multispecies ethnography, my pictures of people portrayed frail relationships of people in their balconies taking breaks from the pandemic. The presentation's 'vertical' photography portrays an experience of collectivity that is imbued by fear, death and insecurity and a reaction to the pandemic via a sense of self-worth. Principally, as Steyerl claims "the perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war from above, one that throws jawdropping social inequalities into sharp focus. But falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place (2012, pg. 28).

Paper short abstract:

The analysis of the massive taking and sharing of images of Covid-19 pandemics through social and mass media addresses several questions on ethics and the role of photography to offer multiple narratives that cover the complexity of its nature, while reflecting on important absences and excess.

Paper long abstract:

Covid-19 pandemic has taken place in a context of massive making and sharing images online, favoring diverse and multiple narratives of everyday life (Gomez-Cruz, Lehmuskallio, 2016). In this sense, these images taken by common users during Covid-19 have been added to mass media photographic production contributing to offer a more complex narratives of pandemic. However, this multi-faceted representation seem to be frequently bias towards a more symbolic and even frivolous approach. Thus, a significant presence of memes on what is like living under pandemics, and pictures portraying leisure activities, especially during the lock down period, among others, have been shared massively offering a positive thinking narrative and attitude (Cabanas, Illouz, 2019), while images of the pandemics in all its harshness, showing the collapse of the health system, the chaos of the nursing homes or even the dead seem to be limited or even hidden.

In this sense, this paper analyses photographic practices during times of Covid-19 as well as addresses several issues, both ethical and anthropological, on the complexity of offering visual narratives that cover the very nature of Covid-19. That is not only showing the everyday of the so called “new normality” but also photographing suffering, grief and death (Morcate, Pardo 2019), while proposing some causes for little representation or even absence of certain images.

Paper short abstract:

The images of COVID-19 cover issues from the medical to the social through the economic. The iconography of this phenomenon is far from the “Epidemic Photography”. We propose to use the term “Photodemia” in order to cover all the complexity of this syndemic whose analysis and study is complex.

Paper long abstract:

Technology and social networks keep the population informed, connected, safe and even working during COVID-19 for the first time in a health crisis like this. The term “infodemic” refers to the overabundance of information that has generated misinformation and stigmatization.

Images have filled social networks, the mass media, the Apps... Visual communication and co-presence have reached new horizons. We have seen thousands of images but the iconography of the COVID-19 is far from the “Epidemic Photography” (Lynteris, 2016). Maybe “Syndemic Photography” will be more appropriated following the experts that refer to COVID-19 as a Syndemic (Singer, 2009) with serious effects in the social context.

It is difficult to distinguish the images of health from those related to work or socialization. From the experience in these years of visual digital ethnography: most illnesses have social, economic and personal effects that transcend medical issues. This only has been made visible when the patients and caregivers have conquered the capacity (agency) to represent themselves in public space. The contemporary imaginary of illness, disease or malady has much more to do with the visibility of synergistic disease or synergistic health than with old medical photographs.

I propose the term “Photodemic” (Pardo, 2020) to refer to the question of images of this syndemic that is probably more viral than “infodemic” and more difficult to identify and study. The methodologies applied to the texts, that allow the systematization of the analysis of words and speeches, are not yet applicable to the storytelling through images.

Paper short abstract:

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in New Zealand in February 2020, with a Level-4 lockdown implemented on the 28 March 2020. Easter and ANZAC day both fell within this time of social distancing. During the lockdown I documented the distanced sociality.

Paper long abstract:

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in New Zealand on 28 February 2020, with a Level-4 lockdown implemented on the 28 March 2020. I, like others, was restricted to ‘social distancing’. While people, for the most part adhered to physical distancing, communities were finding ways to engage in acts of reciprocity through anonymous non-contact “gifts”: stuffed toys (mainly bears) in windows, chalk messages and hop scotch on pavements, and painted stones and laminated slogans tied to trees and shrubs in local shrubs and bushes. This was especially apparent during the time when ANZAC Day and Easter are celebrated with community. I argue that these messages are intended as visual community “gifts,” a way for members of the community to contribute to sociality as well as show that they are doing their part to “flatten the curve” and act as responsible members of the community.

If, following Turner, we are currently in a liminal stage, I wonder what social stage we are moving into, and if these self-perpetuating gifts will continue to lead us into different configurations of community, of self-actualisation and responsibility to a more holistically global sense of the world as interconnected through visual representation.

Paper short abstract:

During the lockdown in Britain, I spent 2 days a week for 6 months photographing and volunteering at Made Up Kitchen, a volunteer kitchen set up in the community centre on my housing estate. Its ethos was to provide nutritious and plentiful hot and cold food for people on our estate.

Paper long abstract:

The act of volunteering and photographing allowed me to immerse myself both physically and mentally in the kitchen enabling me to gain a much greater understanding of how this small, nondescript building tucked away behind a small row of shops had become the centre of a web of connections.

Prior to the Coronavirus Pandemic I had already begun researching the relationship between community centres and modern-day communities but realised, as we went into lockdown that I needed to react to what was occurring now within the area I lived.

Made Up Kitchen took over the building, which was more used to holding community meetings, gardening sessions and workshops on money management, turning it into a food preparation and distribution hub. This small building, tucked behind a row of estate shops, quickly became the beating heart of this corner of East London.

As their network started to grow through established connections and new links via social media and word of mouth, organisations such as Edible London, GMG Gurdwara and the Felix Project began delivering food to Made Up Kitchen while other organisations such as Concorde Youth, Co.operate19, and Bike Works plus numerous other individuals, coordinated themselves into cooking and delivering the food to local people.

It was this network that I began to follow and document.