ANOTHER SOCIAL DISTANCES

April 2022

Performance at Acción Spring (t) UCM, Madrid

"In times of crisis, only imagination is more important than knowledge". Albert Einstein

Another social distances

Third and final proposal that brings into play a new symbol, the plastic jumpsuit or PPE, which we healthcare workers use when treating Covid patients. The PPE is an image with tremendous media exposure, it has established a unique relationship between white plastic with blue stripes and the pandemic. Seeing a PPE is seeing Covid. This action completes the experimentation of the PPE in three different spaces: La Covitera (Streaming TV Studio), Acarrear el Muerto (Public Road) and Otras Distancias Sociales (Exhibition Hall).

The pandemic

The world we live in was shaken to its foundations by the pandemic. Covid caused an informational, social, political and economic earthquake, altering our family, social, work and cultural habits. The certainties, security and dreams of the world we knew turned into uncertainty, fear and isolation. This virus - and everything it entailed - took away customs, freedoms, mobility, rituals and common spaces, as well as the satisfaction of our direct contact and plunged us into enormous tiredness and exhaustion as a society.

We have lived through times we never imagined. Lockdowns, restrictions, distancing, loss, impoverishment, misinformation. All these changes have brought with them an unprecedented transformation in our way of relating to each other. The contemporary social model of massification was shaken and called into question in the face of the new public health situation.

The proximity and presence of others became a threat. The crisis exacerbated the shortcomings of the society of our time; hyper-individualism, social atomization, the commodification of human content, lack of cohesion and even contempt for others.

ANOTHER SOCIAL DISTANCES proposes, through the symbolic treatment of these new interpretations and realities, an alternative reading of this new and unexpected problem that has so profoundly altered our way of relating to each other. A cathartic action that presents us with other distances that have appeared after the one imposed as a preventive measure against contagion. Distances - sometimes - weighted towards certain groups such as the health sector, which has suffered multiple times - as citizens, as workers and as patients - from the vicissitudes of the epidemiological crisis.

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