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Mediator is exactly
Personal Voices
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2020-04-17T19:30
Isolation and Illumination
I included this video because in my own time practicing social distancing and social isolation, I noticed that my days and nights became dominated by two distinctive scenes, which is a rather harsh contrast to the variety of settings available to me normally. The first being the windows to freedom I had driving in the car to and from the grocery store, or occasionally to go through the drive through. The second is my home, or more specifically the bedroom from within which I have to sleep, study, eat and entertain myself. Whilst I had access to several peripheral liminal zones between these two, such as the balcony outside my bedroom and my local walking track when walking my dog. The neon lights and empty spaces of the outside world through the car window, or through the layer of social distancing in the grocery store exemplify so much of the feeling I have experienced in isolation. I can’t quite pin down this feeling with a pithy phrase yet, but I found that the physical confinement to settings which became routine was so much more traumatising than the lack of social connection which was for me almost an over surplus rather than a lack as I am constantly surrounded by family with both my mother, brother and occasionally cousin being confined to a small cottage house. I feel like the whole world became this strange liminal space in which daily communal expectations were suspended without being overturned with new expectations, I never really got the sense of ‘the new normal’ that others have mentioned. -
2020-05-25
A Gift From the Past
The first person I visited when restrictions in Tasmania were eased the first time was a ninety-year old lady, a family friend and distant relation who knows all the stories everyone else has forgotten. I sat in her house for two and a half hours and listened to her talk about our family and all the people they knew, and I learned about a past that is rapidly disappearing as the people who remember it age. After my visit, she gave this glass to my mother. It was my great-grandfather's preferred glass at the local pub, and was gifted to this woman's husband after he died, as he was a great friend to my great-grandfather. She chose to give it to us thinking it would mean more for us than it does her. I had intended to visit Mrs Howlett for months, but life kept getting in the way. The pandemic afforded me the opportunity to explore my own past and the history of many other people in a way that I usually can't in everyday life, and this glass is a physical, tangible example of that experience.