Introduction

Jinan Coulter – Founder, The Imaginal

We live in truly unprecedented times. When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, few people could have grasped the full magnitude of how our world would be overturned. Life and death emergencies resound across the globe and intrude into our collective awareness and experience; medical anomalies multiply as lifesaving doctors and nurses struggle to comprehend and keep up with the deluge; familiar modes of life give way to alien separations of uncertain duration; spectres of loss and hardship emerge from all corners and few can deny the confounding and painful reality unfolding before and around us. Our world has been brought to its knees.

Life, Death and Collective Consciousness

For many, a new consciousness has emerged. Compassion, solidarity and empathy are heightened as the world is thrust into a fierce battle for survival. For others, awakening from the illusion of omnipotence is a hard pill to swallow. Denial and bravado are in overdrive, as is narrowing individualism.

And still, the innumerable stories of suffering and loss, near and far, remind us all of our own mortality and vulnerability. Never before have so many people feared for their loved ones and for themselves in the face of such an insidious, invisible threat. A foreboding sets in as the death tallies spike and the case counters never sleep.  

In countless locations, unspeakable news is given and received; impossible decisions are made in critical moments as to who can be saved and who turned away; in some quarters, the elderly and frail are effectively deemed expendable, and across television screens and news articles, images appear of cities and towns where there is no longer anywhere to bury the dead.

From Crisis to Reckoning to Uncertain Futures

This pandemic has forced us to reckon with ourselves; to collectively pause and take stock of various dimensions of our human existence, from all that we normally take for granted, including life itself, to our typical modes of being and relating, individually and collectively.

We are reminded of how interconnected our world is and how it is yet simultaneously divided and vastly unequal. Inequality is growing – the super rich have become exponentially richer during this crisis as ordinary people’s lives bottom out. As the pandemic surges, global supply chains have been heavily disrupted. Poorer countries face a steepening downturn as trade slows and food insecurity rises. Developed countries that have long-relied on outsourced manufacturing are forced to reconsider their overseas dependencies; factories are repurposed to deal with critical shortages of masks, PPE and ventilators and to jump start domestic production. Governments are forced to intervene in unprecedented ways to curb economic collapse by supporting businesses and subsidizing salaries. Hotels are taken over to shelter the homeless and low-risk prisoners are released from incarceration, all to contain the virus’s spread. In some ways, the old order is completely upended and in other ways, its worst aspects are amplified.  

The profoundly disruptive and calamitous circumstances that we find ourselves in, while precipitated by a virus, has advanced further into a global man-made catastrophe produced by a convergence of human denial, arrogance and indifference at both communal and (most shamefully) higher political levels, including, in some places, downright dereliction of duty by those entrusted to govern and to protect our societies and public health. The corporate monopolies on health insurance and therapeutic drugs, as well as the defunding of national healthcare systems, have left millions inadequately protected, if protected at all. Elsewhere, in various countries of the Global South, the devastation of the pandemic is cruelly magnified by conditions of conflict, occupation, sanctions and poverty brought on by the neo-liberal order.

This crisis has also revealed the extent of our destructive impact on the natural world and corporate capitalism’s disregard for human and natural life. It has confronted us with the stark contrast between the realities of the world we live in and, for many, the vision of the world we want. The contradictions of a system that is exploitative, destructive and unequal but whose foundation is also predicated on networks and structures of interconnection, is laid bare in a uniquely stark way, and offers a glimpse of new possibilities, solutions and directions in the struggle for equality and a better world.

A Paradoxical Moment, An Opportunity

It is paradoxical, this pandemic, both polarising and unifying –– we are at once sharing a common human experience with all its embedded emotions and upheavals but also a vastly divergent one, determined greatly by parameters of age, gender, race, ethnicity, class and health-status. It would be wrong to call this the ‘great equaliser’ and yet the unique feature of this crisis (and indeed of all pandemics, by definition) is that it crosses multiple borders and lines.

COVID-19 has unleashed vast suffering on our world (from record levels of unemployment to the dire impact on health and life) hitting the developed world in an atypical and profound way, alongside poorer nations, with medical systems across the globe near collapse. While public health infrastructures differ radically from one country to another, determining the course of regional epidemics across territories and societies in distinct ways, the pandemic has––for a rare and unstable moment––thrust us together at a basic human level in an extraordinary way. The suspension of normal life and the experience of isolation, magnifies for all of us the deep and universal need for connection, community, sociality, solidarity and purpose. The critical nature of this global emergency also underscores the universal need (and right) to access life-saving healthcare and life-sustaining resources.

The shared reality that we now inhabit and its temporal (yet transient) simultaneity, invites us to imagine new ways of being and relating; to contemplate new forms of agency and struggle; and to build new solidarities that place the long-silenced issues of class and race (and the ways in which they overlap) at the forefront of struggle. As the virus and the entrenchment of power by our global elites continues to proliferate, the urgent necessity for a radically different order can no longer be ignored or minimised.

The Pandemic Chronicles is an ongoing multimedia project that seeks to provoke critical reflection on what it means to live through this shared human experience, on the impact it has on us all, and also on the issues and problems that this crisis has (re)exposed. Through the contributions of moving-image artists, filmmakers, curators and writers, this project invites us to reflect on these times, to reimagine our world and our modes of being and to rethink our vision for the future, as well as perhaps the means through which we can bring it into being.