It is contemporary, in this very moment, Coronavirus is happening, eating, hurting humankind. It is unpredictable. It is fast; I made the film on 12th February, the virus outbreak in Italy did not happen yet, the Scandinavia was not yet infected; People in the video were talking about Europe might be safe. It is very time-based, it is the history that is happening.
This is everything about Coronavirus taking over the dominating power from human, and forced us to change lifestyles, to be aware of the air, the environment. How we should respect the capability of nature, how we protect our kind and coexist with a global health crisis. As a human, I have to discuss it in my artistic practice. Because of the rise of racism also is creating another level of cultural abuse, the virus became an excuse for racists and damaging the process of civilization.
“If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.
Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.” [1]
On this level, I tend to think that nature has its consciousness as an entirety. From the Stone Age, the Iron Age to the Machine Age, humans have transformed nature more and more intensely; from the awe of earth to overpower nature, nature has tardily become a tool from a god in the eyes of humankind. Three hundred years of industrial civilization is the civilization of humankind conquering nature, social productivity is advancing, and humankind is demanding nature unprecedentedly. Still, people gradually forget: nature is not an object; natural life is closely linked with the presence of human society. In a sense, the earth is priming an immune response to humans. It began to respond to parasites, and the human infestation seemed like a bad infection. Europe, Japan, and the United States are like cancer foci, teeming with replicating primates, and the human community is expanding and spreading in ways that could lead to extinction.
1.Robbins, Jim. (2012). The Ecology of Disease. The New York Times
* Photo credits: Mina Paasche
Viral Viral
2020
Performance Video Installation
Dimensional Variable