I Made An Intimate Project During Quarantine

InSicurezza (InSecurity) is my new project made during this lockdown time.

While the laboratories worldwide are working to find a cure or vaccine for covid-19, the only way to handle the ongoing pandemic is through social distancing. Closeness and contact now mean contagion because each of us can be potentially infected, and would become a potential infector from which we must keep our distance.

Everyone is concerned about their survival, so temporarily and voluntarily we are locked up at home. With social distancing going on, no one, not even our loved ones, should be approached or touched.

This generates InSecurity because in front of us there is an invisible “enemy”, and the excesses of InSecurity lead to irrational behaviours: we end up doubting everyone, with the consequence that personal relationships become oriented towards suspicion.

This new imposed loneliness as an effect of social distancing, brings us to find refuge in social networks to find connections without risking a real contact. Now also the contacts with our loved ones have become virtual, we miss the aspects of real socialization, which is based on physical encounter and sensory contact. Missing these, which have been our daily base until now, leads us to understand that virtual is not gratifying or satisfactory and maybe for the first time we realize how much this socialization is unreal.

In these days, physical contacts are made through a barrier, and the virtual ones, always through the filter of the Net.

We are separated, a barrier, a plastic sheet physically separates us one from each other, even from our loved ones and prevents us from touching them. On line, however, we are wrapped in this virtual plastic veil, which avoids us from connecting the other without any kind of filter.

Social distancing and physical isolation break everyday life, and push everyone to focus on ourselves, on our anxieties and insecurities in relationship with others. These months of dramatic experiences tell us we have much to improve in our social relationships and in relationship with ourselves.

From another point of view, however, a plastic sheet also becomes the symbol of protection, the attempt to secure everything we love and want to protect. In this dualism of emotions denial of contact occurs because I protect myself but also because I protect you, the physical contact that generates emotion and Security is denied to us. I would like to touch you but in the same way to protect you and put you In Security (In Sicurezza).

At the same time, I feel InSecurity because I don’t know if I can infect you or if I can be infected by you.

So we rediscover what makes us human: enormous capacities and possibilities, but also fragility, weaknesses, insecurities, need for solidarity and mutual help.

The painful renunciation of not being able to touch our loved ones for weeks, becomes the hope of being able to touch them for years and years, and maybe it is precisely in this renunciation that relies the conception of loving others.

More info: alevirgulto.com

I Made An Intimate Project During Quarantine