Artist Claire Fontaine in Italy - Letters against Separation. "It’s important, but not easy, to stay out of depression and be angry, because we are paying the price of austerity: we can’t be cured, can’t afford to be sick, therefore we can’t afford to live. “The coffin outside, the TV inside” as Vaneigem1 brilliantly puts it, we are being enjoined to still work remotely in an Orwellian nightmare that disregards entirely the biological situation of lockdown. Tasks such as shopping for groceries or medication may take five times as long as usual; housework and childcare will claim the rest of the day for men and women alike. Writing and concentrating become a challenge. Thinking clearly without walking outdoors or touching anyone for weeks must have an unacknowledged impact on anyone’s productivity: being connected to the internet cannot be a guarentee of being able to deliver, and deliver what exactly?" "And yet we experience these days a new temporality that is uncannily familiar to many of us. Slowness, low productivity, home schooling and preparing one’s own food were already the daily life of most of the people we know. We just got stripped of all freedom and the possibility of getting together in order to make precisely this way of life sustainable. What happens to empathy during lockdown? What happens to the empathy with the sick? To mourning? What happens to desire? According to Preciado, “In this new reality, those among us who had lost love or who had not found it in time—that is before the great mutation of COVID19—were doomed to spend the rest of our lives totally alone.”3 And younger generations already ill at ease with the un-photogenic reality of bodies might become germophobic and accustomed to consider other people’s physiology as a revolting menace, the proximity of their breathing, the droplets in the air as threats. Going to the cinema, to the theatre, traveling for leisure and simply living a collective life might forever lose their appeal under an induced mass hypochondria." against Separation – Claire Fontaine in Italy

This touches upon so many relevant ideas. No one knows yet what is objectively happening, and I agree that we must therefore find an emotional way of understanding what is happening. Then also to think about how we relate to the natural world (if there is such a thing). We have to wake up to the urgent realization that we are in fact of the world, not spectators. The coronavirus is just one of the many battles in what feels like a longer ongoing war for those left abandoned through austerity.