NEW article: “Hope or, Pandora in the time of pandemic”

This short article “Hope or, Pandora in the time of pandemic,” is a contribution to the online journal Rosa Mercedes, as part of a collaboration between the Journal of Visual Culture and the Harun Farocki Institute (Berlin) that was initiated by the COVID-19 crisis. The call for contributions, read:

“There is a lot of spontaneous, ad hoc opinion-making and premature commentary around, as to be expected. However, the ethics and politics of artistic and theoretical practice to be pursued in this situation should oblige us to stay cautious and to intervene with care in the discussion. As one of JVC’s editors, Brooke Belisle, explains: ‘We are not looking for sensationalism, but rather, moments of reflection that: make connections between what’s happening now and the larger intellectual contexts that our readership shares; offer small ways to be reflective and to draw on tools we have and things we know instead of just feeling numb and overwhelmed; help serve as intellectual community for one another while we are isolated; support the work of being thoughtful and trying to find/make meaning…which is always a collective endeavour, even if we are forced to be apart.’”

My article originates from a workshop seminar that I taught on July 4th, for this year’s group of young curators who are taking part in the Curatorial Incubator program at Vtape in Toronto. The program’s call read as follows:

“We live in hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us.” 

P. McCartney 

The darkness. We each have our own and then there’s the shared sense of despair that bubbles up when we consider the degradation of our Mother Earth through our own polluting ways, the never ending wars that sweep refugees towards borders that close in their faces, the stories that are told, the lies that circulate. There is no end.

And yet we move on. Not in the way the so-called Enlightenment projected – towards greater and more perfect perfection. But just moving: towards love, towards caring, towards hope. At Vtape, we felt that we needed some of this spirit, so we propose that the current Curatorial Incubator look through our holdings to find those works that best exemplify hope. Happy hunting!

Falling stars, black nihilism, Elsa Morante, Walter Benjamin, Bartleby, Giorgio Agamben, and Pandora are brought together in this brief meditation on what an image of hope might look like today.