Pandemic times: Nine acts

Abstract

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I found myself stuck at home, like millions of other people. Confronted with constant news reports about rapidly rising infection and mortality rates, I reverted to creative methods to investigate and come to terms with the challenges of lockdown. Exploring the surreal state of immobility, vulnerability, and emotional turmoil, Nine Acts emerged as an experiment in picture-informed linguistic association. Post-pandemic, the works offer space for ethnographically rich, evocative dwelling.

I painted the visuals in 2020–21 and added their poetic companions in 2022. Momento Mori (Figure 1), based on a pre-pandemic sketch (Figure 10), investigates how the endless stories about dying patients triggered personal memories of my mother's pre-pandemic death. While earlier academic publications (Svašek 2008, 2010, 2012, 2018) already commented on her illness and absence, the painting-poetry mode of articulation opened a new avenue for “tracing the density of human being” (Rapport 2022, 1118).

Sisters (Figure 2) materialized while chatting with my sibling through Skype, and Jumper (Figure 3) describes the moment I realized that “painting from a distance” could be developed as a research method. The following four Acts (Figure 4-7) explore the use of the approach during online fieldwork with migrant women in (Northern) Ireland. In 2010, I had researched how communication technologies (fail to) create emotional connections within transnational families (Svašek 2010, 2018). In lockdown, I returned to this highly topical theme (Svašek, 2022; forthcoming). Hope, Side by Side, Basket, and Homeland investigate how COVID-19 affected female migrants' long-distance interactions and locally lived lives and comment on ethnographic making through painting. On Teams and Conference² analyze Teams and Zoom as conferencing tools and show the potential of painting-poems to transform virtual meetings into humorous experiences (Figure 8, 9).

While pre-2020 graphic anthropology already demonstrated the value of concentrated bodily attention through sketching (Alfonso 2004; Causey 2017; Dix and Kaur 2019; Elliot and Culhane 2017; Hurdley 2019; Ramos 2004, 2018; Tausig 2010; Haapio-Kirk and Cearns n.d.), painting-from-a-distance helped to explore pandemic predicaments. Combined with poetic writing, an effective tool in the hands of skilled ethnographers (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor 2010), the painting-poems capture “the patchwork and minutia of sensuous life in the project of making worlds with others” (Rubaii's 2023, 3). Performed in 2022 for fellow anthropologists, they pulled the public together in a momentary experience of empathetic togetherness (Figure 11). This multimodal performative approach can be incorporated in all kinds of ethnographic projects and reach audiences within and beyond academia.