Quietness, isolation and reimagining contact in the city after the pandemic

Abstract

In the beginning of April 2020, visual artist Daniel Solomons and myself, a film scholar, set out to collaborate to produce something in response to the experience of the lockdown. We departed from a set of video images recorded in London’s Liverpool Street Station in March 2019. From the distance of confinement and the stillness of the worldwide shutdown of passenger transport, the video images of the frantic movement of people in one of London’s biggest train stations had acquired a different dimension. We wrote a text to accompany the images which took as driving force the last words of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ (2006). The poem evokes an image of quietness and contentment that created various contradictions with the situation that we had been thrown into. We wanted to explore the feeling of seeing mass mobility from the perspective of stillness and belonging to the past as in the present was to be avoided.