Sanpapié Dance and Physical Theatre (Milan, Italy), A[1]BIT at home
To RESIST is what we’re doing: firstly, we’re trying to withstand the feeling of being separated, angry and trapped. We do live performances and we miss the audience, shared public space and presence, not replaceable through a screen. Even in this situation, we’ve chosen NOT TO GIVE UP DOING, NOT TO GIVE UP SEARCHING for the hidden inspiration, for the intrinsic possibility, for the opportunity to interpret the word EMPATHY in a deeper, more inclusive, poetic and ironic acceptation. We can and we must keep on considering dance as a collective ritual, that allows us to feel connected and alive, in any present moment we find ourselves in. Dance as a site-specific of existence: living the breath gratefully, sweating and thinking, touching ourselves in creation waiting for the skin.
Thomas Valianatos (Corfu, Greece), "Self Portrait 02", digitally manipulated photography, NFS.
This isolation motivated me to rethink many aspects about the outside world as an established structure and triggered me to explore my inner world, struggling to express my emotions through an artistic medium like generative art. This video was captured with Touch Designer software and it is based on geometry feedbacks from a web camera.
Lori Harrington (Chico, CA), Not my window, NFS.
This is not my window. I wish that it was. My window looks out over busy streets and into neighbor’s houses. My window does little to inspire my soul. This is a friend’s window into a beautiful backyard garden full of light and happiness. A safe space for passing birds to rest and refresh, bees seeking nourishment and well-behaved neighborhood cats to watch and sleep in the sunshine. I wish this was my window. If it were – I would never move from it.
Nancy Wyllie (Ithaca, New York), Primer for a Pandemic, NFS.
The view from my window is obscured by mountains of books; many covered with the dust of neglect. The frantic self absorption of my daily life has long silenced their urgent messages. Now the weight of this reading list is crushing. The many volumes that remain unread could not be sounding a louder alarm yet I fear I have answered the call too late. I have nothing but time now. I pour over the pages to find the common thread that led us to this place and seek a way forward.
Joas Nebe (Hamburg, Germany), Dance II, NFS.
Dance 2 footage has been shot on a open air Berlin dancefloor back in 2011. The footage has been remastered into more or less abstract patterns, which turn again and again over into recognizable parts of dancers.
Dance is a perfect example for the human basic need for socialising, which is interrupted by the drive to distance from each other. Like in human relations this two drives are basic. Social distancing interrupts this up and down of approaching and distancing and so the dance becomes a souvenir of past times.
Joas Nebe (Hamburg, Germany), The Puddle of Dream No. 1, NFS.
The footage used in this video has been shot at a hurricane evacuation route in Southern Florida. The beauty of royal palms along the street masks the underlying horror of the emergency situation which means leaving your home and your belongings behind in order to rescue one´s own life. The quarantine and the confinement, we are experiencing all over the world, is similar and at the same time the opposite of an escape from a place endangered by a hurricane, because we are force to stay in one place in order to save our lives and the lives of other people instead of fleeing.