Today, it is warm outside. Sun could touch skin, for a moment, a few minutes, half an hour. Each time someone jogs past me, I hold my breath, I noticed this today. And I start to wonder how many more invisible and silent patterns have already settled in bodies moving in urban space. Some close friends spend time in the countryside now, staying in the house of a befriended family, and they tell me that not much has changed in their daily life. Solely grocery shopping becomes an adventure for a single body, instead of collective excursion and responsibility. And return to home remains a vague date.
After spending a few hours in Zoom-Meetings with many people, most of them I never met in person, I end up in a conversation where redefinition of virtual space is attempted. While I feel my friends, that I love to touch, moving further and further away, as my physical recollection of what they feel like, what they smell like, what the sheer presence of their bodies is, moves into an undefined space where memory and imagination mingle, I discover empathy on a physical level while commenting on the designs of a variety of platforms that enable live-conversation in times of Covid-19. For instance, D. mentions that on Facebook messenger call without video, one can see an aureole around one’s profile picture that radiates with the changing volume of one’s voice. I then imagine D. getting closer to the microphone, moving away from it, breathing, moving the jaw, and tongues to form words. Suddenly I feel spacially close to D. We probably look for connection and sensibility wherever we can at the moment. This thought is (also) amusing to me. Or maybe I reveal here that I haven’t arrived in the 21st century yet. Where to find sensibility right now? Where to find an equivalent of touch? At least for the time being and as a strategy to not lose one’s mind. A shift in perspective. A shit loads of perspectives. Sitting perspective. What are the triggers that remind me to feel the body while sitting in front of the screen? Truman Capote wrote lying down.
While formulating this text, I listen to Laurens waves again and again. Drauf hängen geblieben, sozusagen. It is soothing and it moves me. I start to think into Alica’s proposal more in detail after reading her first post. No, I imagine walking through the image she posted. Entering it, walking in it, pausing, returning, as if it were a building or big scale sculpture. I watch Maria amid piles and piles of paper sitting on the floor, writing by night, in my head. I want to drink tea after reading Lina’s post. I wonder how one keeps things whole if one wishes to do so. And so on and so on.
I discover feeling into the processes of our A.PART artists. Welch Überraschung! Welch Glück! Welch Entdeckung! Welch Fragen über Fragen allerdings, die ich mir noch unformuliert und leise stelle, weil ich sie selbst noch nicht verstehe.
j
