The COVID Confessions
I remember that as a youth I was obsessed with Myst, a PC game of the early 90’s which immersed the player in both adventure and mystery. The game began with a kind of time travel to a deserted island where the player was encouraged to spend the game piecing together the puzzle of the people who lived there before. This island land included forgotten libraries, the remnants of books, and eerily confusing found footage from long lost characters. The game played with multiple philosophical concepts and precepts, while the island itself acted as a time capsule, preserving all of the hidden knowledge of the characters' lives and familial relationships for someone new to discover it and make right this now forgotten world.
In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered many of us the opportunity to exist in an alternate reality, a new normal, where things are not quite like what they were before. As we gaze into the looking glass of this blackened mirror, each day seems to open up a new portal and new possibilities to imagine a world different than this one, as the world we once knew seems to be ever present while constantly slipping out of our grasp. These new timelines also offer us the opportunity to not only think about what is next, but what has been lost in the shuffle of moving forward. There is a need to take the time to be still and think back on if, and how, we want to remember this time. How we want to remember ourselves and our people.
Therefore, the COVID Confessions is a collection of recordings, images, and written work based on my writings and reflection from the first month of social distancing and the current pandemic. By traveling back in time to various moments in March 2020, this time capsule of long forgotten memories and morning pages encourages us to remember a time before, a time now, and a time to come. Through dramatic readings of these moments in time, this project plays with the relationship between past, present, and future through the themes of societal unrest, spirituality, ancestry, and education. Drawing inspiration from the American Ethnological Societies collection titled “Pandemic Diaries” and other #PandemicDiary recordings, the COVID Confessions project offers a reflection on what I have come to know and understand from life in quarantine.
By engaging in this project, I hope that you are encouraged to reflect on your own relationship to record keeping and remembrance. Some questions that you might ask yourself: How am I remembering this time? And what would I want future travelers to know about the pandemic? What would I want them to know about me? Thinking about your responses to these questions, also imagine what you would need to do now, or what you could have done before, in order to remember this time as a catalyst for change. Whether that be keeping your own #PandemicDiary or making videos and recordings of your experiences, always find ways to remember the time.
