For an experienced event is finite — at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.
—Walter Benjamin
The Image of Proust
I made these images during the early days of the pandemic’s lockdown, when all of London seemed like a plague stricken village and its scenes of abandonment stared back at us. At the time, I started going out on these long bike rides through the city. Before lockdown, my slow moving self had become fully acclimated to torrent of abuse spewed forth by fire-eyed bike commuters who crammed the streets’ edges. But after, even at the hours of 8-10 am, when I shot these, I had lanes and lanes of asphalt, all to myself.
The sun was bright and beautiful and the air was clear on the days I went out when I might find myself stopping on the roundabout in front of Nelson’s column, taking pictures of despair. London itself had, in an instant, recast itself as an immense vessel where opportunity and serendipity and joy had been drained like so much untreated sewage into the Thames.
What I saw and felt and captured was, by some measure, the most accessible evidence that these times were different, that, by stepping outside of our doors, we were walking into the unknown. I took these artefacts of the moment and reversed their playback, hoping to bring forward the sense of disorientation and disconnection we all so powerfully felt when the crisis was new.
Scrolling through, the videos create in a series of juxtapositions — layering on top of one another into formal combinations of movement and geometry that are subtly collaborative in their creation. Except for the first two, the order of videos play in is randomised. Even the music, split into four tracks, play at slightly different speeds as the scenes change. Such new combinations are designed to encourage exploration where each movement up or down the page reshapes the image.
I’ve put together the videos to be like playing cards, in the familiar double-ended court style where the image could be read either upside down or rightside up. In scrolling up or down the viewer is stacking them, in either direction, to infinity. This pandemic moment has revealed that, for all our chest thumping claims of economic resilience, much of what we have built our lives on is quite delicate. We stack thing on top of thing thinking they are solid as stone, but they are really thin as paper.
Of course, these images of inertia were masking other pictures—of hospitals and care homes— where far too much action was spilling over into chaos. What happened there lies in more shrouded territory— personal facetime chats held on deathbeds, quick phone footage of jammed covid-ward hallways. Whatever metaphors of loss one might contemplate seem inadequate when set next to that thick and growing ledger of death.
There was a lot of despair in those first days, but there was also hope, that if the world pulled together and followed a few simple rules, we could beat this back. Of course, we know now that it all proved to be beyond us. As a people, we couldn’t solve this. It seems laughable that we thought we could. Too many of us heard what we wanted to hear, and rationalised our actions around convenient untruths. Meanwhile, the political gains for being a contrarian and siding with conspiracists proved too rewarding to the bureaucrats and officials that mattered.
And so we seem to have fallen back to that classic technique that we use to solve any big crisis— we throw money at it. A few vaccines have been approved and more seem nearly ready to go. And with London, as of this writing, on a schedule to loosen lockdown rules, it’s not unheard of to think that, in a year, this could all be over.
But I felt it worth recording, worth running our minds over what the texture of life has been over the last nine months and what price it has extracted from all of us.
We see and know, finally and fully, that a virus can freeze time and flip the world on its head.
And this will not be the last of them.
Jovi Juan
Bedfordshire
March 2021
Credits
Technical Notes