{"id":6282,"date":"2021-02-11T20:26:24","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T20:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cov19chronicles.com\/?p=6282"},"modified":"2023-04-26T16:04:47","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T15:04:47","slug":"making-covid-life-visible-at-last-unlocking-the-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19chronicles.com\/making-covid-life-visible-at-last-unlocking-the-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Covid Life visible at last: Unlocking the Archive,"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Through the UK government\u2019s 5pm TV Covid press briefings<\/a> Prime Minister Johnson has tried to connect to the British public about Covid. This has not worked. In 42 briefings in spring and summer 2020 the government wove between two tones of articulation. First, the flourish<\/em> \u2013 bold or extravagant gestures, actions and statements designed to attract attention. Johnson and Raab brought military metaphors; Sunak metaphors of kindness and gentleness. The call was: be uplifted! Second, the abstract<\/em>. All ministers referred to complex systems of circulation: the national rates of flows of germs, people, transport, healthcare equipment summarised in endless statistics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Between the flourish<\/em> and the abstract<\/em> in political discourse what was missing was the concrete<\/em>. here was brute silence on what Covid is actually like, what a person suffering Covid experiences, or how life is for those in the family of someone with Covid. Apart from a few personal anecdotes, there was even a relative scarcity of examples of life in the UK is at all. This is perhaps understandable: throughout 2020 there was a basic lack of scientific knowledge of how Covid moved through supermarkets, care homes, schools or workplaces. But by avoiding discussion of navigating these everyday environments the government could not express the everyday experience of life during the pandemic. The present reality is missing. Unable to connect to how people felt or how life was, the government\u2019s TV briefings to the nation created an emptiness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A new exhibition, Unlocked Archive<\/a>, makes a first step to fill this gap. Researchers<\/a>, mostly based in Swansea, South Wales and mostly refugees and asylum seekers and undocumented workers, have used artistic methods to express how their life is during Covid times. By crafting visual images, verbal tales, short cinematic films and music playlists, we find an accessible and authentic set of stories not only from migrants of many kinds based in\u00a0 Wales but by people in similar situations around the world. They offer descriptions, performances, reflections, heartfelt emotional testimonies to the challenges they face but also their contributions to the local community. As Covid continues, this is a living archive. Some identities are open, some are hidden. A baby is welcomed into the world is by his parents on film but their faces are pixelated out. The result is a collection of chronicles of life under Covid layered with what, for marginalised people, are the enduring and now sharpened anxieties and insecurities of life.
One of the researchers who helped co-curate Unlocked Archive, Marie Gillespie<\/a>, has used the term \u2018cycles of insecurity\u2019 in her own writing to explain how the dilemmas and forces people face across a range of issues compound each other. This can lead to a feeling of entrapment and powerlessness. This is a useful concept for making sense of why Covid has compounded further many difficulties of those contributing to Unlocked Archive. One participant uploaded a cartoon that reflects this compounding (Figure 1):<\/p>\n\n\n\n