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(W)All the World's a Stage: Re-Imagining the Common Amid the Pandemic Lockdown

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Communities of all sizes—from nation-states to cities to neighborhoods to households—are being divided into smaller and smaller units and asked to remain separate in an effort to contain and inhibit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. In the name of COVID-19, public spheres are currently over-colonized by narratives that frame us as incapable of communal and relational care unless we rely on authoritative practices of governance, surveillance, and governmentality. 

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Far from being merely stories these narratives are constitutive of realities that are always-already dispossessed of collectivity. Within these constituted realms the virus is objectified in order to justify and legitimize racism, fascism, nationalism, class hatred, stigmatization, discrimination, and exclusion. 

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However, the worlds that are deeply defined by power relations are not the only worlds that can be constituted. We can—and are—experimenting with alternative modes of worlding. COVID-19 renders perceptible the modes of non-hierarchical collective care and mutual aid that are continuously in the act. 

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(W)All the World's a Stage sheds light onto the realities that are and can be constituted through these world-making caring acts of equity. It transforms an outside wall of a home in the neighborhood of Ilioupolis in Athens into a public cinematographic screen that projects videos, photographic installations, and performances from all over the world out to the neighborhood and back to the world. It shapes space and creates time for existing and continuously unfolding non-authoritative practices of mutual care to be shared, witnessed, enacted, documented, performed, and lived.  

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If the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us anything, it is that—when it comes to situations like this—borders are nothing but fabrications that reconstitute power differentials. Yet the immediate response is to close the borders in order to stop and filter out a flow that performs beyond them. (W)All the World's a Stage creates flows and loops of interconnections between the situatedness of the local neighborhood and the abstract global collective. 

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By reclaiming the televised tools that are primarily used to disciplinize us to externally imposed body management and social hygiene measures, (W)All the World's a Stage explores different modes of collective expression and spectactorship. It experiments with sensing physical proximity in ways that exceed localized experiences of space while simultaneously mapping and documenting new spatial modes of togetherness. 

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We invite artists, performers, activists and others to share video and photography through this collaborative encounter. We call for work that explores, represents, expresses, or documents the experiences of people all over the world as they react to the pandemic and to the governmental responses to it, as well as their efforts to shape equitable and caring collectivities during this time of division, separation, and isolation.

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Please contact relationalsoma@gmail.com with your video or photographs, under 15-minutes in length so that we can find a night to project them onto The Wall. Technical requirements and collective agreements constrain us from including audio components.  However, text could also be projected, either as its own unique contribution or as part of a video or photographic piece. 

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We will document the projection of your video/installation by capturing photographic moments in real time. If you so choose, we will then add your project to this site, posting these pictures on a page dedicated to your project along with a link to the work if it is already hosted on another site. 

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Together we will collectively shape an archive of non-authoritative communal care amid the pandemic lockdown. 

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With love and solidarity,

The (W)All the World's a Stage team