Manifesto
The word “isolation” comes from isolé (fr.),
isolato (it.) and, also, insula (lt.) - island.
isolato (it.) and, also, insula (lt.) - island.
Words by
Anna Wojnarowska
Jacopo Botticelli
We’re all stuck in small spaces, these days. Surrounded by restrictions that condemn us to a condition of insularity.
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🏝Is our future floating away from familiar shores?
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🏝Are we effectively turning into individual islands?
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No man is an island. entire of itself: every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
English poet John Donne wrote these verses while ill at home back in 1623. Fast-forward to 2020 and we envy his confidence in such a statement. The consequences of lockdown policies during the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak are hard to guess. Are we shifting towards becoming islands? Or, now more than ever, we'll stick to our past lands?
We may well absorb the insular condition we're getting used to, redefining how we interact with what's outside our small-scale units. We may change our approach to what's closest to us - respect it more, cherish what we’ve got, be more creative with it. We could actually shorten the distance with what was already in our proximity.
Or we could reject a new way of living that is sensorially mutilated and socially limited. We could focus on longing for what was before and on fearing and denying what's next.
We could become land-tied islands while keeping a direct relationship with the other from us. We could strengthen our connection to others. Now more than ever. Or we could find our islands underwater by the time this emergency ends.
🏝It's not in our interest to predict the future, trying to outline what we currently see as a blurred picture. What we want to do, instead, is look outside our windows and, mostly, inside ourselves to understand what’s shifting. In his 1982 debut 'Music For Nine Postcards' ambient music composer Hiroshi Yoshimura tried to frame the movements of the clouds he'd seen from a window view. In the same way, we want to tell the story of what we see from our locked down perspective, by framing it in a postcard to be shared with those who we can't physically reach.
We want this to be an open process of reflection on our current condition. The recipient becomes the sender, feeding into the project with another view from the lockdown.
🏝The months we'll live in isolation may be quickly washed away from our memories, because of the dumb repetitiveness of our daily routine. How will we look back to these days? In the future we may not remember what exactly happened and what didn’t. But some shifts will stick. Be it a permanent change in our personalities or a temporary lockdown-induced feeling.
We'd like to crystallise that shift. So that, one day, we can glance at it like we normally do with an old postcard and immediately recall how it felt like to live in isolation.