Quarantine Politics Act 2 -- A "Balconized Cityscape"
13th Window: April 24, 2020. Window owner: Francesca. Location: Zurich, Switzerland. Window owner’s feelings: “I’ve never felt so much tired.”
by Salvatore Giusto
May 24th, 2020
The city of Bergamo, Northern Italy, is not only my home-town of origin. It also is one of the most important epicentres of the current COVID-19 pandemic. From late February 2020 to late July of the same year, in fact, about 10% of the Bergamasque population has been killed by COVID-19. Generally speaking, the political life of my home-town is usually characterized by strong ideological divides. Following the COVID-19 outbreak and the Italian government’s decision to decree national quarantine on March 9 2020, however, Bergamo witnessed an unprecedented moment of (at least perceived) social unity. Being legally banned from interacting with each other in public spaces, Bergamasque people who would usually ignore each other or worse out of political reasons (such as, for example, my leftist parents and their conservative neighbours) spontaneously started to regularly check on their respective safety and personal moods on a daily basis.
Within such a context, private balconies therefore emerged a main Bergamasque infrastructure of interpersonal socialization and collective mobilization. Since quarantine laws have been enforced by the Italian government, for example, my parents and their neighbours went on their respective balconies almost every afternoon in order to update each other and add some “human touch” to their otherwise “virtual-only” social interactions. By the same token, private balconies became the stage of iconic musical flash-mobs, which punctuated the first phases of the Italian COVID-19 crisis. In order to publicly show their resilience and hopes for a safer future, most Bergamasque people collectively participated in spontaneous musical performances live from their balconies. As such, they played various “traditional” Italian songs symbolizing their unity against a common tragedy, including the national anthem and popular opera arias by Giuseppe Verdi and Gaetano Donizetti (the last being an historical opera composer from Bergamo). Some of these musical performances got widely shared on the online social media, thus becoming worldwide popular.
As emerged from the conversations and ethnographic interviews I had with Bergamasque relatives and friends partaking in these flash-mobs, balcony concerts served their own participants as a first response to overwhelming phenomenological conditions of intimate fear and isolation. In fact, singing together helped the “flash-mobsters” to remind to each other that they were still alive and capable to made their voices heard in spite of any current odds. In so doing, it also helped them to make sense of their personal suffering while framing their common pain as an integral component of an important historical process (that is, the COVID-19 pandemic and its global outcomes) to be interactively represented (and therefore constituted) via collective public performances.
Among other things, these performative practices revitalized the architectural function due to which Italian (and overall Mediterranean) balconies have been historically designed since the late Middle-Age onwards. This function is that of constituting physical areas of social inter-mediation between private and public spaces. Accordingly, the performative practices in question ended up re-defining the windows and balconies of quarantined Bergamasques into the main (if not the only) architectural means through which physically watching “what was happening” outside of their private lives, comparing their interpretations of the crisis with each other, and expressing their collective pain.
28th Window: May 6, 2020. Window owner: Marianna. Location: Rome, Italy. Window owner’s feelings: “I’m fantasizing more and more about escaping to the beach.”
I have been engaging in intense conversations about the socio-political lives of windows and balconies in the times of COVID-19 with Arianna Milesi (a quite talented Bergamasque graphic designer and personal friend of mine for about 20 years) since the beginning of the pandemic. Following such conversations, Arianna decided to start an artistic project, which she named “Una Finestra Sola” (ironically meaning both “a lonely window” and “it is only a window”). Arianna’s project aims to graphically pinpoint how (either Bergamasque or international) quarantined people process their emotional reactions to enforced isolation through the visual landscapes offered by their respective windows and balconies (or, in other words, the only “non-virtual” openings to the public world to which they have access). Arianna requested all of her quarantined online contacts to send her pictures of their balconies and/or windows, together with a short sentence describing their current feelings. She then realized paintings that reproduced each of such pictures. In so doing, she employed eclectic graphic designs and chromatic patterns that impressionistically depended on the contextual feelings of each balcony/window owner. Finally, she shared back such paintings on the online social media in order to collect feedbacks on them and fundraise money in support of Bergamo’s hospitals.
26th Window: May 1, 2020. Window owner: Marie. Location: London, United Kingdom. Window owner feelings: “I was happy to see the sun coming back...A bit bare…But it reflects our recent movings.”
I find Arianna’s project an interesting attempt to map the effects of the COVID-19 quarantine policies on the sensorium of those involved in them, as well as the pivotal role played by architectonic infrastructures such as balconies and windows in the intimate processes through which quarantined people relate to the public world. I would therefore like to close this speculative composition of mine by sharing a link to Arianna’s project, as well as some examples of my friend’s work.
Una Finestra Sola: https://www.facebook.com/una_finestra_sola-115691966782754/