Paper short abstract:

The paper engages with two different strands of aesthetics of death while seeking to socialise suffering in the context of the pandemic fatalities. In one strand the dead are in open, improvised cremation or shallow water burials, and in the other they are in, closed, improvised morgues.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal foregrounds the visuality of India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 within the backdrop of global covid deaths. In India (2021), the wave metamorphosed with the seasonal arrival of summer and brought to the surface a charnel aesthetics of death, in the form of mass open cremations. The death-pile setting was one of logwood pyre beds, rising flames, grey smoke and the smouldering dead side by side with the PPE clad funeral workers and mourners. However, we know that this mass open cremation aesthetic is neither limited to the Covid pandemic nor is it the only epidemiological referent for India across the last two centuries of recording calamities and disasters. The scenes of mass corpses floating in the river would make an equally competing claim as the master panorama of disaster deaths in India. In such a scenario, relying on heterogenous archives, we must turn away from any one signature image and think of waves of images that might help us graph and collage the movement of death during a pandemic such as the Covid-19. How might we fathom the panning effect of the global pandemic deaths through a similar waves of images such as the Indian examples mentioned above? I draw upon my decade old, self-curated, google alert archive, based on web crawling of global disaster deaths, to bring up slightly different aesthetics of death than that of mass open cremations and floating corpses. This aesthetic is of improvised morgues at the time of disasters, including covid deaths.