 Rhaid i chi'n gilydd hynny, mae'n argymau Seraterna, ac rydych chi'n defnydd y dyfodol perfforddiadau i'r rhesud y Pwyllgor a'r Pwyllgor Llywodraeth i'n hwnnw, a gydag i'r event oedd gydag yma, ond mae'r ffordd arlesiau a'r pandemig, a'r pwysig, yn gwybodaeth yng Nghymru, ar y cwrs Mac Cormack, yw adegiwr anhygoel ar y ddiweddach. A ydw i'r prysgwrs, ar y ddod ychydig, ac ydw i'n gwybod,unning that nominations its working conceptualizing and crafting these events and for his ongoing collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre. Art in the pandemic Part Two will unfold over two days and today we are considering the idea of safer spaces and tomorrow we will ponder wearing out with a range of artkritics, artists, activists, art historians, poets and writers who will discuss the implications of the current conditions of a global pandemic for their work and the broader field of art criticism and writing, and more broadly writing on art and culture. Collectively these two panels will continue and reshape the discussions had at the art criticism and the pandemic events organised by Chris with the Paul Mellon Centre in July 2020, which considered how the structures of a globalised art world have been interrupted or changed and whether in the context of renewed activism the art world is addressing problems of inequity and injustice in its own order. These ideas remain just as urgent, if not more so, as the art world renegotiates the legacies and ramifications of making, thinking and writing about art and culture in the context of a global pandemic. These events over the next two days will be spaces for testing out ideas rather than final words and there will also be space for questions and discussions punctuating the talks. The talks will be recorded and hosted on the Paul Mellon Centre's website where you can also find out more about our work as a research centre and as an educational charity. Before handing over to Chris to introduce our panel today, I just want to quickly run through a bit of housekeeping for our online webinars. You'll see that each talk will last about 10 minutes and after every second talk there'll be a Q&A where we'll invite you to ask questions. The event has closed live captioning and if you want to see that you click on the CC icon on your webinar control panel to see those captions. Use the Q&A box to ask the panel questions and the moderators will read those out for the panelist to answer and we really encourage you to get involved and be part of this conversation. You can also use the chat box to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties and the team at the PMC will get back to you. The session will be recorded and we ask you not to take photos during it and of course any offensive behaviour will not be tolerated and the attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. I'll hand over to Chris now to say more about the theme of today's panel and to introduce our speakers. Many thanks Sarah, I'll try and keep this as brief as possible but firstly I'd like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre and Sarah Teller for bringing this programme together and to extend last year's talks and to reflect upon some of the urgent subjects raised through the pandemic. I'd also like to thank Sean O'Blanchfield for all her hard work behind scenes too. The impetus for this talk came from an increasing awareness of how the tension between individual body control and collective health security during this current disruption of the pandemic is tightly framed across the globe and how it constricts a timeline of conflicting modernities and access to vaccination. Further considering the global as one continually remade by colonial forces and extraction, how might histories of pandemics chart our understanding of the way statecraft narratives that regulate access to marriage, reproductive rights and legal gender have and continue regulate the infected, the sick or dangerous body through border control. Today's speakers will reflect on this subject of sovereignty from Uganda, Ireland and Northern Ireland and Thailand to articulate emergent patterns of commonalities and difference and of inclusion and exclusion. This leads me to welcome today's panel. It is truly an honour to have you here and genuinely thank you for taking the time to contribute to this session. I'll introduce each of the speakers today and today we are joined by Dr Shreya Chatterjee who is a contributing editor for the Open Access Peer Reviewed British Art Journals co-published by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Yale Centre for British Art. She is currently a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media at the FHNW in Basel and Associate Scholar at the Matt Plank Art History Institute. Shreya holds a PhD from Princeton University and was awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Honorific Fellowship in 2019. Shreya specialises in the political ecologies of art and design in the 19th and 20th centuries with a particular focus on transnational environmental histories, histories of art and science and the relationships between climate and race. Shreya is currently leading the international digital project visualising the virus in which she will discuss today. Isabel Harveson is an Irish art historian and critic and lecturer in critical studies in the art department at Geltzmys London. Her research interests lie at the intersections of art, politics and media and writes regularly about artists working for performance and moving image. Her current academic research focuses on the history of artists moving image in Northern Ireland from 1968 to present day in relation to political and media history. Her talk will look at three feminist films from this territory made during the 1980s and is concerned with colonialism, civil rights, reproductive rights and renegotiated citizenry. Dr Stella Nianzi is a multiple award-winning medical anthropologist with specialisation in sexual and reproductive health, sexual rights and human sexualities in Uganda and the Gambia. She herself identifies as a grammatical queer feminist scholar, social justice activist, human rights defender, non-violent protester, poet, Facebooker, opposition politician belonging to the forum for democratic change, former aspirant for the Kampala woman MP from 2020 to 2021, an ex-prisoner from Luzera women's maximum security prison and mother of three teenagers. She obtained her doctoral degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2009, a master of science degree in the medical anthropology from university of college London in 1999 and a bachelor of arts in mass communication and literature from a career in university in 1997. Finally, Ariane Suttivong is an independent curator and writer based in Bangkok, Thailand. She works closely with both Thai and international artists, pick apart dominant narratives and framings and collectively seeks to redefine them. Together with Lara Van Meteran and Barbara Wissink, she is co-organising the inappropriate book club as part of the Bangkok Biennial. She is co-editor of common descent, text and art and politics in the age of radical appropriation and holds an MA in art and politics from Goldsmiths University London. The order of today's talk will be stellar followed by Shria, after which we will have a chat or a discussion of their papers. We will then hear from Isabel and Ariane before opening the discussion. I urge audience members to add questions as we go. As Sarah mentioned, we aim for the talks to be conversational and open for debate. If I could kindly ask Stella to start her presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Chris. I will share my screen and then start the presentation. Can everybody see? Have you received the screen? Yes, we can see this. Right, so I'm grateful to Chris McComack of Art Monthly for inviting me to participate in the Hall Mellon Centre's panel on paper spaces under the second part of the series entitled Art Criticism and the Pandemic. I was focused on the ambivalence of borders as underscored by COVID-19 and the narratives and praxis of statecraft unraveled in Uganda but Africa more widely in attempts to curb transmission of the virus. The notion of safety deployed in the construction of safer spaces relies heavily on boundaries, borders, fences, gates, and perimeter walls made of bricks if one is Donald Trump. Given the COVID-19 is largely airborne in transmission, one wonders how high the walls of the boundaries between safety and risk would have to be built. Growing from globalizing directives from the World Health Organization, national health and security relied on closing down, locking up, and shutting down each country's borders. Inflows and outflows of human traffic out of, into, and within borders was suspended, securitized, criminalized, even penalized and pathologized. Immediate arrivals, especially at airports, were arrested, quarantined, sometimes for up to 14 days tested and observed. They were potentially dangerous bodies. For Latin Africa and other territories with a colonial history, our national lockdown programs relied on national borders. That's the importance of my first map, a map, a piece of art we have inherited from our colonizers, delineating our national borders. I'm from Uganda at the time of invitation. I was on exile in Kenya and now at the time of presentation, hardly a month's crease. I'm now back in my country because Kenya is undergoing a second lockdown. But our programs relied on national borders created during colonialism when our colonizers, including Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain, greedily partook in the traumatic scramble and partition of Africa. Our geographical borders, beautifully drawn in the cartography or map of Africa, are a colonial creation. My passport as a Ugandan is a colonial legacy. Indeed, our national and African continent borders are part of our colonial heritage. They are a reminder that we were once colonized even in this colonial moment. Our coloniality, our history of being colonized peoples, was reinforced when national borders became crucial to ascertaining safety of countries. This colonial imprint is deeply embellished onto our identity as members of the Commonwealth, former colonies of Britain, as Africans running deep to influence our politics, our economics, cultures, languages, I speak English, and our allegiances even today in the COVID-19 programs that we have as nations. So growing from my geography during the COVID-19 lockdown in Uganda, I enter this space as an artist, as an activist, as an activist who grows on not fine art per se, but on poetry and writing genres in creative writing and fiction. One of the five times I was arrested in 2020 was because I was allegedly caught disrespecting the borders and the national border closures. I was charged with violating COVID-19 guidelines by participating in an activity likely to spread COVID-19 through using porous Sofia borders to cross from Kenya into Uganda to highlight the duplicity, hypocrisy, and double standards of the joint state. Sorry, Dara, I believe Stella might have pause for one moment, just give us a minute and I'm sure she'll be back. Thank you. Why have I disappeared? You have but you've come back. Thank you, Stella. Sorry about that. Again, I'm in Africa and in my country there's a severe monitoring of what we do on the internet, but I'll keep going. So just to highlight the duplicity, hypocrisy, and double standards of the security agents in the time I was arrested, King Ronald Mutevi, that is the king of my kingdom, his visit across the same national borders was widely publicised and published in the social and public news media for the heightening. So I should have a picture, which is not coming on, but I'll keep going. I should have a picture coming up. Sorry about this. Yes, that is King Ronald Mutevi of my kingdom in Uganda, speaking with the president of Kenya, so he crossed the national borders during the national lockdown related to COVID-19. He was not arrested, he was hailed for doing important foreign policy and relations work. I was arrested. Further heightening, the duplicitusness and duplicity distinguishing of human bodies engaged in cross-border travel during the pandemic, President Yowari Musevyn, the president of my country, was also widely publicised, travelling to Tanzania, another country neighbouring us, to meet the late, this is president John Pwmba Magwkuli, who was rumoured to have died with COVID-19. His utter denialism of COVID-19 science because he asserted it was colonising, imperialistic and globalising, was at its peak, illustrated by the tension in the contrast between the president Musevyn's convoy, all of them are wearing masks, those are the ones on the right on the left hand side, while the defiant lack of protective masks of his counterpart, President Magwkuli, and his convoy, speaks to this interesting contrast. So, while Yowari Musevyn again was hailed for travelling across borders during the COVID lockdown, to a country where the president had not issued any lockdown measures, any COVID-19 restrictions for his country folk, he was not arrested, the king of Uganda was not arrested. I, a poor woman, supposedly and allegedly found across the borders using porous borders was arrested, charged, and I'm facing particular cases in court right now. It is apparent from this biographical and political anecdote that the profiling of mobile bodies as dangerous bodies with real potential to be vectors of COVID-19 is not applied uniformly to all human bodies. Men of power and authority, in this case a president and a king, somehow had immunity, which obviously excluded my kind. Viruses do not respect bodies. I now turn to the unfortunate consequences of statecraft during COVID-19, creating alternating contradictory, compelling, competing, and even exclusionary modernities. The progressive, linear, and globalising sustainable development goal of achieving universal health was the main driver of almost all our national policies and programmes designed and deployed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Infra country mobility was suspended in Uganda through the issuance of strict prohibitions of public and private transport for all people inside the country. The only exception there allowances were provided to essential workers whose status was confirmed through the issuance of unique COVID-19 travel permits, which recalled another colonial legacy of the apartheid systems don't pass issues to black ritual miners during apartheid in South Africa. Again, we see a creation of two artificially bounded categories of supposedly mobile, safer, essential workers, and the immobile, non-essential other. This correction had consequences upon individuals and groups that routinely needed the troubles for other health services, including dialysis, antiretrovirus therapies for HIV AIDS, women who had to attend anti-native care for pregnant mothers, and the safe delivery of babies to other illnesses. More of the prohibition and mobility, but the prohibition of mobility was classist and exclusionary because it penalised and endangered people who travelled daily to make megar earnings from wage labour in the informal sector. For many of these Ugandan's who leave a hand-to-mouth existence, the safe measures necessary to achieve right to health and freedom from COVID-19 directly exposed them to alternative pandemics, namely the hunger pandemic arising from the poverty pandemic. I just shared a slide that disappeared, and it is grown from my first arrest in 2020, which was affected at a peaceful demonstration against the delayed and failed distribution of food relief packages to vulnerable people, a new category of dangerous people, endangered people, vulnerable people created when mobility to earn subsistence income was prohibited. Income poverty was exacerbated by COVID-19, a few, which led to closure of the night economy, and we can talk a bit about the night economy and how borders and boundaries around time impacted and created new forms and alternating notions of safety and risk. With rising unemployment, poverty and lack, the assumed safety of home was heavily eroded as idol violent men began or scaled up domestic violence and gender-based violence. As I used my last few minutes to introduce what I want to say, I guess is I have spoken as an activist thinking around the porosity, the porosity of assumed fixed borders in COVID-19. I think that the national measures that we had relied heavily upon a conceptualization of safety within borders that were non-porous, as I have highlighted from my biography, but also the political situation in Uganda. Many times these borders were proved to be false and non-imagined, inadvertent other borders was created around social categories. What is the role of art and artists in this small presentation of med? I want to say that as an activist it would have been good if we had artists utilizing creative non-violent means to speak through power. Of course, in my case as an activist, it became dangerous because COVID-19 was utilized and deployed heavily to criminalize any forms of contestation and questioning of the uniform blanket head homogeneous directives that were given to the state. It would have been wonderful if we had artists on board countering and amplifying and visibilizing the issues especially around iniquity and the vagaries and obscenity and oppressiveness and recreation of new inequalities created by the COVID-19 borders around space, around safety and around time. I look forward to an interesting discussion but also to learn lessons that I can take away that perhaps we can employ also in my current context. Thank you very much. Thank you Stella, that was great. We'll come back to some of the issues that you've raised in that paper but we'll move on now to Shria and then we'll have a discussion. Shria, could you show your screen and start your presentation? Great, thank you so much Chris and thank you Stella as well. I'll share my screen and just a second. Do you see my screen? Yes, this is coming through. Yep, okay great. So I want to just thank Chris for the introduction and both of you Sarah and Chris for making these spaces available for discussion and have these conversations I think is really important. So I'm going to present an ongoing digital humanities project here today and the aim of presenting the project really is to start a conversation so we can think together about the global as one continually remade by colonial forces and extraction, about nationalisms visualising invisibility as well as modes of care. I also want to say before we start that even though things have started to seem optimistic in the UK with the lockdown lifting vaccinations more or less on track the situation in India and elsewhere in Brazil for example is a really stark reminder this is still very much an ongoing crisis and it's really far from being over and so I want to be mindful of this and how vulnerable many of us are feeling at the moment with devastating news boring in from friends, family and colleagues. So visualising the virus is an interdisciplinary cultural project and the final outcome is a digital platform through which audiences can visualise and understand the coronavirus pandemic from a variety of perspectives so what it aims to do is centre the inequalities that the pandemic makes visible so it really thinks about visibility and visualising in two different ways so the gaps between humanities social sciences and natural sciences are hard to bridge and this means that pandemics are often studied without considering their many interconnected histories visualising the virus connects insights from different disciplines to create a collective digital space for exactly such a convergence. The project takes a unique approach to understanding viruses so we use visualising as a verb to mobilise a method because if you think about it to visualise is really the first revolutionary step towards action in a world where much of life and its politics is invisible so visualising the virus teaches us to look differently the digital architecture of the platform invites the visitor to navigate clusters of connection I'll show you in a moment what what I mean by that one can explore links between quotidian lived experience pathologies the natural sciences and socio-cultural critique more or less the same place so provides a visitor not just with a dynamic archive but spaces of reflection on the scales of the crisis and our current infrastructural inequalities so visualising the virus is particularly committed to making visible the stories and connections that are not otherwise so visible so the digital project was set up in the first place to go beyond media narratives around COVID-19 centre facts and reflections between science and society from communities who are made invisible it aims to provide a granular intersectional picture of the pandemic as it evolves and we're working in close collaboration with various partners including the University of Global Health Equity Rwanda and various other partners one of them also includes the global social responses to COVID-19 web archive so I'll tell you a little bit about this web archive so the global social responses to COVID-19 web archive contains a broad range of websites related to COVID-19 that are maintained by residents of Africa, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia and other territories of the former Soviet Union Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, Oceania and South and Southeast Asia so it really tries to cover a very global perspective so efforts have been made to archive websites produced by underrepresented ethnicities and stateless groups in all parts of the world so broadly speaking the collection focuses on social responses to the COVID-19 crisis as represented in local news, NGOs, art, blogs and social media as well as sort of popular movements rather than national news and national government initiatives though there are some exceptions to this room the collection is stewarded by 29 curators that include IV plus this is IV plus libraries confideration their partners and other libraries across the United States and Europe so we're trying to work with them to set up and with Princeton and some other funding grants which we hope will come through so we're trying to set up a series of part-time research curatorships and fellowships for early career scholars to work with us to create and curate content and invite scholars who are working in the field and activists to weigh in on some of the things that are in the archive so we're still in the very early stages of the project but I can explain I can try to explain a little bit how we envision the layout and digital infrastructure or architecture rather of the project so what you see here is a mock-up and it's not what it's actually going to look like it's just something that we have for the moment but it's a useful way for me to actually just show you how something like this can work so we have what you see here is is what we're calling a cluster so it's a theme of different kinds of contributions that are either text or video or audio contributions as well the texts are all very short they're about 500 800 words in there meant to be even when you ask somebody who has written in depth about something we ask them to write a short text that makes it makes the topic accessible to a wide variety of readers and so the little circles you see are the other contributions and where I can't click on it right now but in real life eventually you'll be able to click on one of the contributions and that will give you the contribution but each so each cluster is a themed section and then within each contribution there are various tags so for example something on COVID-19 and surveillance in Japan may also be tagged with something like lungs or smartphones or in different kinds of like surveillance patterns and these form mega clusters so for example if you click on lungs you'll get a variety of different things from different countries and perspectives so it really provides a way of of seeing things differently and kind of weighing different inequalities and ways of seeing so I can give you a sense of what kind of clusters we will have or what kind kind of themes and before I say that I should say that some of the clusters will already we're asking for contributions based on a cluster that we have in mind but very often we'll have we'll get a lot of contributions and then form a cluster depending on what we what we get so we have a cluster for example on COVID-19 and racial inequalities which will include a range of reflections from different parts of the world and so critical race theorists have described how an epidemic of metabolic diseases such as diabetes was produced by the industrial food system before the pandemics these diseases which disproportionately impact communities of color make susceptible make people susceptible to COVID-19 complications so in writing about pre-pandemic inequalities in medicine and the food system Anthony Ryan Hatch notes that racism transforms as it seeks to profit from our bodies and so the color as the color of COVID becomes apparent with the racial data tracker project in the United States Hatch also writes about this and says when we measure the effects of racism we're remembering and documenting intergenerational patterns of violence enacted on the bodies of racism's victims so in a sense clusters such as COVID-19 and racial inequality not only give us kind of a window into what's happening right now but they're also reflect on kind of longer histories of racism and and not just medicine but society and as well so other clusters are included but are not limited to things like COVID-19 and food security which shows how the invisible supply chains of food and labour are affected in a pandemic and affect the most vulnerable communities so we have a cluster on indigenous pandemic perspectives which makes visible different aspects of the pandemic on indigenous communities in the Americas, Australasia and elsewhere a cluster on vaccine imperialism delves into geopolitics and capitalism COVID surveillance explores the untold ways in which visual mapping of the movement of the virus can become a larger visual mapping of one's habits interactions homes even so I'm just trying to move on from this slide. The website will launch at the end of June and so this year we were supposed to launch earlier but given the scale of the current crisis in India we've decided to move the launch to later and because I think we also want this to be a space of reflection and action and to think about the geopolitical state of things at the moment so I think it's also helpful to be sensitive to the fact that as it's important to reflect on these things it's also important to actually pool our resources and help in any way that we can at the moment so we're launching a little bit later but we're going to grow for two years and then so it's conceived not as a static repository or archive but one that's in becoming and we will continue to add material to it over the next two years and then after that it becomes everything is open source and available and it becomes something that's accessible to researchers for years to come and the idea for the project is also that it's a it reaches a broad audience of scholars students activists and general readers and thinkers beyond the virtual we're also mounting a series of workshops teaching modules and so on to build on our methods and research um this is all to say that we're very much still looking for you know sort of contributions collaborators funding it's a it's a project in its early stages very much in making so we would really love to hear from all of you and and we can talk more about connections to other speakers on the panel and so on soon thank you thanks Drew for a great talk and what feels a vital resource for what will be undoubtedly one of a significant period of time and I think you know it's good to feel that something somewhere this is being archived and it's going to be made into something that's accessible at a public level um Stella I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what you raised in your paper um I mean in a way there's so much I want to ask really but um how how do we begin I want to talk about um you know your work as a poet and how that has informed your activism and where that takes you as a thinker maybe begin with that be really interesting to hear what you say there right so um I live in a repressive dictatorship where we have a militant um octogenarian who's been in power for 35 years and he he he claims to have won elections in January of this year this means that he's not open to criticism or critique or even questioning a lot of dissenters and dissident voices and people who question or interrogate government practice have been punished and penalized. I was arrested and charged twice because of poetry that's quite heavily critical of Yuri Museveni. I used sexual metaphors, I used in italia, I used sexual processes, I referred to him as a pair of buttocks and equate him to shit and call for activists to to offer him enema. I used that sort of language because the language of diplomacy the language of stability and respectability the regime doesn't hear or listen to anymore so I use poetry and I draw from tradition of radical rudeness that was employed in colonial times in my country to fight against colonial um masters and many people who used this were men so the fact that I'm a woman and a feminist troubles a lot of people why is a woman questioning um and so I think that poetry is one of the last few resources the creative arts cartoons making a mockery of the president cartoonists have been arrested and imprisoned graffiti makers have been arrested and imprisoned a man was arrested last month for having an effigy and and beating the effigy in the streets so even creative voices are arrested charged I was sentenced to 18 months um because I dared to question and critique and I think part of the problem is that people of privilege people of education people with resources tend to work for the government to further in French it's repressive oppressive policies and programs poetry for me offers a creative outlet which cannot be stopped by prison when I was in prison I released a book of poems which was quite it was an undoing to the to the to the regime because they cannot handcuff versus or rhyme or stanzas um in court although we lost the first level court I and and I was convicted we kept calling for alternative interpretations of metaphors of abstract concepts that are captured creatively by creatives and creators of alternative knowledge right and the court are deaf to that I think that part of the success of alternative modes of voicing or colouring or uphiving even collating dissent in repressive regimes is we we demand for particular resistance we demand for hard work of interpretation we can make claim of a poetic justice for example or or of freedoms that are given to us by by by by by the artistic creation so as a poet that's what I do I have written poetry around COVID-19 that almost got me into trouble again because I think it was quite scandalous for a country that a woman was arrested and centred for 18 months just because she wrote a single poem the second poem which I've been charged twice for offensive communication um through through through poems and posts on Facebook each time offending the president the second time I used the the buffing process of esiteria and esiteria happens to be the mother of the the name of the mother of the let president but my name Stella would also have emanated from esiteria so um just playing around with language where one can do nothing else and often my poetry is accompanied with cartoons so for me that's the media that to artistic media that I am closest to a poetry um in terms of your research and your archiving following Stella's points that in terms of the visualisations that you've charted or met has there been similar occasions where you've seen instances of resistance to let's say the more surveillance like common images of the the virus and how it's kind of been controlled and state controlled can you say something about that? Yeah absolutely I think it's it's been a very important part of it as well and um so just as an example um we have a cluster on COVID-19 sorry COVID-19 and and protest in in Hong Kong and um this was an exhibition that happened in situ but um they're they're worried that they won't they can't really have an afterlife of the exhibition in in Hong Kong itself um and so we're we're featuring that with with a kind of with a short essay about resistance and what it means to be in a political regime um that doesn't allow you to to to express yourself um but but I think the the other aspect of this is as Stella was saying Stella I have a question for you about your poems as well but and and hope we can be in touch but for for India for example we have quite a lot of cartoons political cartoons that centre around not just the pandemic but the handling of the pandemic by the government the kind of the priorities of the government on handling the pandemic and um and also um something a cluster on fake news and what what it means to propagate false narratives around around the pandemic and how that is politically motivated um as well so and um so I think this has been and most of the entries there are are by artists and activists um and um also some communities um so yeah great um I wanted to also ask Stella um you've done so much work in terms of activism and you mentioned some of your work in sort of medical work in terms of uh gaining reproductive rights for women or access to sort of menstrual products and so on I wondered if you could say a little bit about that and that work that you've undertaken and where that stands now in relation to the pandemic and has has those efforts uh have they been hampered through this period of time and or have they shifted or where has your attention moved to and maybe it'd be great to hear something about that right so thank you Chris but also brilliant um um presentation from Shri uh I think to to answer you Chris I'll first hail one of the things I wish we had in Uganda that I see evidently in in Shria's visualizing or digitalizing um um this COVID-19 archive the campaign you talk about uh the which was raised I mean I I did it really in as a protest activity to to say to a president who promises sanitary pads to girls who are menstruating during campaign season and he asks the parents to give him his votes so he'll provide this when he gets back into power and after he's sworn into the presidency he really gets on he renegs on this promise and he's not courageous enough to do it in person he sent his wife who's the first lady she's addressed as mama janity the matriarch of the nation but mama janity tells blatant lies and says we don't have money in our reservoirs to to provide sanitary pads to girls and out of outrage that menstrual blood of women poor women was being used so um shamelessly so misogynistically I gathered um I had a online but also physical campaign collecting funds part of the problem is when I was arrested and accused and that sanitary pad campaign was criminalized uh and and set up as a danger to um state sovereignty because it was assumed I am an LGBTIQ activist also uh it was assumed that I was getting money the pink dollars and therefore the the sanitary pads you were distributing would make young girls lesbian like the myth was created and it gained a lot of momentum that very many conservative Ugandan's were the majority because of religion and culture who needed the sanitary pads became very fearful because of homophobia anyway the campaign was had a huge life on social media that's how we organized that is how we created messages that is how we created awareness the problem is when I was arrested and interrogations were done the government closed down our records our pictures our archive and beautiful pictures of of young girls in in rural schools receiving sanitary pads and the joy of learning about menstrual health all that archive we don't have it right apart from what remained on laptops that were never stolen or cameras belonging to journalists who photographed that and so the importance of digitalizing the archive particularly in repressive societies where the government our government shut down the entire internet for five days during campaigns right Facebook is still shut we we still don't have access um people's entire internet life can be taken away if they are deemed to be through hostile as opposition activists and so the response to you but also to highlight the importance of the project that Sharia is doing so while it's academic it's also very camaraderie and we salute you for offering this to us particularly in COVID-19 times and I think what would be interesting is the sort of stories or clusters you create around the repressive deployment of COVID-19 to penalize to punish to other to segregate right now we have mandatory vaccinations for teachers in Uganda because schools have reopened after one year and six months of school closures and teachers went on to new lives and they don't want to forcefully take a vaccine which again we are very suspicious of as a nation because it came it we have the AstraZeneca which was rejected by very many other countries because of blood clots um and so excel in my frozen mid mid sentence um in which case I feel like we are a bit pushing time here so I'm going to draw a line there momentarily in any case and move on to Isabel if I may um it's a shame but okay Isabel we can circle back afterwards as well so that's fine yeah yeah thank you so much let me just share my presentation is this working can you see yes it's coming through so now you can see the first slide of my presentation and maybe also me and you can hear me um I want to thank Chris McCormack of art monthly and all those up full moon foundation for the invitation here and for support from my research and writing in the past um today um I'm going to be thinking about how COVID has highlighted inequality of care across the UK in relation to academic work that I'm undertaking before beginning I wanted to ask the attendees today what they remember of 2019 it's only two years ago two calendar years ago it was the last time that many of us lived in countries that were COVID free traveled extensively or internationally that engaged culturally and saw family and friends freely it was the last year that many of us um perhaps um was a time before bereavement but in many ways it seems like yesterday the date is significant to my presentation today in that it was the date that or it was the year that abortion was made legal in northern Ireland only a year prior to this in 2018 abortion was made legal in the country where I am from that's the republic of Ireland and it remains difficult to articulate the pressures of this non availability on my young life and how it's and how it and subsequent campaigns to overturn it and repeal its legislation have informed my thinking my research and my political convictions today's talk is in many ways about the impact of borders on bodies and of civil rights and I've been asked because of my current research which attempts to map chart and analyse the works of artist filmmakers in northern Ireland from 1968 to the current day the period marks the beginning of a civil rights movement in northern Ireland which coexisted alongside and interconnected with mutually informative international civil rights campaigns this campaign for equality for Catholics in northern Ireland led to the prolonged period of conflict which is often referred to as the troubles from 1969 to 1998 and it's long aftermath this same period is also co-eval with the graduation and flourishing of film and video into the critical and academic discourses of modern and contemporary art with moving image evolving and graduating as a kind of porous and highly political medium the picturing of northern Ireland from the vantage point of its citizens and their international creative counterparts and allies aligns with developments in handheld and DIY technologies and different efforts to vocalise and to draw attention to inequality in the state I want to underline for this talk that I do not speak as or for northern Irish women or citizens who've been impacted by the topic topics discussed today instead I propose that the films I'll talk about present a historical chorus of voices in a vastly important if under resourced archive of audio visual material that testifies to a citizenry living outside or beyond the protection of a state apparatus providing us as viewers textured and complex examples of feminist socialist and intersectional thought and of solidarity autonomy pragmatism and resilience in action my opening slide the one you see now is a still from a work by an artist called merade mclean called a line was drawn and it's from 2019 and in her words in it she explores how our world is structured through the creation of borders and boundaries limiting movement thinking questioning and agency an integral part of the forming imposing and maintaining of these delineations is the control over the narratives around them I use this slide in lieu of a map and to highlight the human activity of line drawing in border making as northern Ireland marked the centenary of its existence as a state this monday past the island of Ireland was partitioned on the third of may 1921 dividing six counties in the northeast from 26 counties in the south and west containing a Protestant majority and Catholic minority partition followed four centuries of the colonization of Ireland beginning with the plantations in the late 16th century on one side of this line Ireland was to become a free state now republic and on the other side of this line the six counties were to be governed by Westminster under the parliament of northern Ireland now the assembly skip forward to a turbulent century of the united kingdom of great Britain and northern Ireland and what stands out is the overwhelming evidence of the inequality of bodies felt by bodies in northern Ireland compared to counterparts in england Wales and scotland and of the brutality of competing modernities within the UK and no year has this been more exaggerated than the year we've just faced statistically incomes are the lowest in northern Ireland or the lowest in the UK and HS patients suffer significantly longer hospital waiting list suicide rates are dis disproportionately high and higher than their English counterparts than victims counterparts and there exists different policies and resourcing for physical and mental health in northern Ireland than the rest of the UK the resources to tend to one's own body differ and this is true in process of gender recognition abortion at various lgbtq plus rights crucial legal processes and health services are often unaligned with those in the rest of the UK and also with the republic abortion is one service that highlights the extent of the inequality until 2019 it had been illegal in northern Ireland since the british offences against the person person act of 1861 this was later repelled under the criminal justice act under the parliament of northern Ireland in 1945 for reference it had been made legal in england Wales and scotland in 1967 more recently in northern Ireland during an extraordinary sequence of events coinciding with a temporary suspension of the devolved executive and assembly in stormont led by the unusually or the usually staunchly anti-abortion party the dup this law is abortion law was overturned as part of the northern Ireland bill during a period of political deadlock came a new clause 10 to the bill that was tabled by Stella Creece alerted and informed by activists in and from northern Ireland and particularly members of the London Irish abortion rights campaign group and here I want to thank Jane Wells for her conversations informing me about the intricacies of this process and the energy and efforts of both herself and counterpart campaigners in ensuring this policy change I think Jane is one of the listeners today the new amendment under the northern Ireland bill obliged UK ministers to comply with their human rights obligation in northern Ireland which had been publicly condemned in 2008 by two public UN reports one by the committee on torture which found abortion laws in northern Ireland presented grave and systematic violations of rights however the situation still remains unresolved there is still poor and unequal provision of abortion in northern Ireland and many of these services have been paused during the pandemic women's reproductive rights have long been a source of grief for people in Ireland and northern Ireland it has also played a key role in the history of artists film in northern Ireland the slide here the next slide shows two stills from a work by margo harkins a feature length work by margo harkins called hushaby baby from 1989 a feature length drama it showed the experience of a young catholic teenage woman called gretti who gets pregnant by a boyfriend and who is then interned and she has to face various degrees of isolation and social stigma and a series of difficult decisions around her pregnancy hushaby baby was mainly funded by channel four under the workshop declaration provision of the early 1980s with additional funding from the BFI and the arts council Ireland and she was also given support and kind and technical equipment from rte who are the uh uh the state broadcaster in the south in the republic support from channel four had begun when she co-founded the dairy film and video workshop uh with other filmmakers and activists and crilly who was director of the documentary mother Ireland amongst other works and trishes if who had worked with the photography co-operative and community dark room panel work dairy hushaby baby came out of harkins interest in the first abortion referendum in the republic of Ireland in 1983 harkin has talked about how she looked south a lot and this is a quote is a quote that she um from a talk that she did in in 2019 at um darks Ireland she said we were connected to britain but our allegiances were with a lot of irish filmmakers and playwrights around then carlill black bob quinn bryd freel so we were referencing all sorts of things and the 1983 abortion referendum was so horrific families were falling out over it and i wanted to make this gentle intervention i didn't want it to be polemic a polemic film but one that would describe what it was like to be 15 in Ireland with its laws at that time and there were two big cases which convulsed the island and lovers was found dead in a field in granard having given birth to a baby beside uh in a grotto and joanne haze was accused of stabbing a baby 28 times the country was full of secrets but joanne haze was another core celeb in that time in ireland for the woman's movement because of how she was treated by the state so my film was not directly about those cases but it was influenced by them and there's several formal references to those incidents in the film um harkin's research and working practice speaks to a dual axes an axis of production where like her many seminal artists filmmakers were funded by organizations in the uk in the absence of a northern ireland film board or other supportive uh public institutions while at the same time there was an axis of critical conversation and solidarity between women and activists north and south of the border for whom similar punitive threats existed in relation to their reproductive rights sometimes these axes jarred the censorship this axis jarred the censorship and restrictions to broadcast of these productions were frequent and dairy film and video workshop were um you know particularly suffered from various broadcasting bands in the late 80s and early 1990s like other films uh produced in the 1980s um this is another slide from a hushed by baby and quite faintly shenado Connor is one of the actors in it um this is a production still from mother ireland which was directed by ann krilley a number and another member of the dairy film video workshop um which was completed in 1988 and first broadcast um after significant edits in 1991 and these are stills from maith directed by pat murphy and like other films produced in the 1980s and here i include stills of ann krilley's mother ireland um and maith by pat murphy it signals the many ways that pregnant people among others gay people transgender people have had to negotiate different circumstances to claim the right to the health of one's own body in all of these three works i'm mentioned there is an exposition of a real and complicated negotiation of subjectivity and citizenry within the units of both family and state and each detail the various results that come of that reckoning often risking social exclusion punitive access punitive action action or exile um so back to the present again and to conclude it's just over one year since parliament voted to ensure that women and pregnant people in northern ireland have access to abortion this is still not the case my second last slide is a timeline of the present details of how the universal provision of abortion in northern ireland has been blocked even in the last year um you'll see highlight real weight um court proceedings where the northern ireland human rights commission are taking um the secretary's dormant executive and department of health to the high court um around commissioning abortion services in northern ireland i can go back to that slide later but i just want to finish on this screen grab of an organization called alliance for choice who are very much active in demanding that abortion is available to women across northern ireland now this petition is live you can go to the website and find out more about their campaigns and get involved and i would just urge listeners readers interested to continue to engage with the news as it unfolds i'm just going to quote um a little um from this uh this um screen screen grab from from the alliance for choice um they it's an organization that was set up in 1996 to give voice to the tens of thousands of women who have traveled across the ire sea from northern ireland over the past decades they describe how and i quote uh from the website the current impacts in abortion access for women girls and pregnant people impacts especially on those who are already marginalised including people with disabilities those in violent relationships migrant women and lgbtq plus people covered 19 has compounded these discriminations throughout the coronavirus pandemic women and girls have been forced to travel to england to access abortion against public health advice to stay at home two women attempted suicide after flights were cancelled and they were unable to travel this must end here at the moment is now and that's where i'll end thank you many thanks isabel and um incredibly moving um material um if we can move on to arianne and then we'll um continue the conversation um well i'll start sharing my screen and sorry this is not the right okay um so first of all um i would like to thank everyone at the paul melan centre for organising uh this talk and christma cormac for the invitation i'm truly honoured to be speaking today in such great company um so while the question central to today's event i thought at first seemed to be pointing towards a more biopolitical lens through which to view art and pandemics um i found this approach was perhaps not the most suited to the current political situation in thailand where power is so outrageously exercised by the current military backed government so instead i would like to look at the state craft narratives that you mentioned um in terms of hegemony and the political dynamics surrounding the pandemic and how art might respond to them um so covid 19 has affected each country differently but for the most part the pandemic has highlighted um underlying structural problems and time until now has mostly been spared there were rather few cases and few deaths although the situation is currently taking a turn for the worst at the moment but for the past year the covid crisis has clearly illustrated the ways in which power and more specifically hegemony functions and it has brought to light several illnesses that have plagued the country since decades mainly a repressive paternalistic leadership style coupled with nationalism and moralistic finger pointing and victim blaming culture or rhetoric that is currently being also encouraged by the current prime minister and several people in power so this is to say that this was never a safe space only the illusion of one which is a rhetoric that the military government um has been has been employing since decade that a military government will bring stability to the country and safety but um the covid the response to covid 19 in my opinion has clearly proven the country so as you may know um there have been massive protests in thailand since last year and um this the protest especially in momentum after um successful period of lockdown and successful here it should really be in inverted commas because while the number of cases effectively went down a vast chunk of the population was did not receive proper aid or financial compensation and um so although the the protests weren't the direct results of the pandemic i believe that um and this stems more from the frustration about lack of real democracy in thailand or human rights abuses i really believe that the tumbling economy which resulted from the poor handling of the covid 19 crisis certainly fueled and added to this climate of this kind of pent so what about art then you might ask so um art functions in this political setting and is caught up with hegemony uh so in in the past some artistic practices in thailand were perhaps in the service of hegemony but in the last few years we've seen a lot of artists largely supporting the protest movement and in the past year taking on key roles within the protest themselves which i will delve into further along the way and again artists also have not been specifically addressing the covid crisis but simply the covid is just another illustration of how art how power works in thailand but doesn't necessarily have any effects on the relationship between art and politics um but nonetheless artists have been the muslin have been um carrying out counter hegemonic practices in the past year which take which take aim at the same hegemony that is behind this poor covid response so i would like to um this is an image that was taken in january of 2020 so it was just a few days before the first covid case was reported in thailand and thailand was the first country outside of china to have reported cases um it says who um the the the writing in thai is an acronym for poonam ngol oedatag angoed which means um our leader is stupid and therefore we will show our dye from it um and that at the time had to do with um the um air pollution crisis and Bangkok was covered in smog but i feel that it's also quite relevant to um the current pandemic so i would like to jump a little bit ahead um and wait no sorry um coming back to the present and talk about um the how the how the pandemic has been managed and for instance of a month ago uh phuong thong pa kawan uh professor and associate professor of political science at juliano gawr university posted on facebook that the government's success in continuing the first covid wave which garnered praise from the diverge all came from the military style of suppressive management imposing restrictions curfews and lockdown nothing that requires much planning or understanding of the crisis but once they have to um do some proactive management or devise a strategy planning for the long term this government has failed us and um i would like also to show you um this is an image that was taken just last week of um thai professor of traditional thai that was performing a sort of ritual ceremony or spiritual ceremony in front of the three kings um statue in Chiang Mai demanding the release of political prisoners that have been detained since the end of last year and um she received a visit in a few days later from the military to and at her home and this is at the time when um really the people in power should really be tackling the pandemic but you can see where priorities are lying so um i think that similarly to what Stella has been saying earlier covid 19 has been used as a pretense to criminalize political dissent and um so while thailand was the first country to report cases outside of china not not much was done between january and march from last year um but nightly um figures of the government would come on the news and threaten to use the emergency decree to um to curb dissent and um and after the first lockdown was eased and while no new cases were being reported in weeks the government still kept prolonging the emergency decree which is still in use today even as legal experts said that the existing disease control act was amply sufficient to maintain a normal situation and also um and the rhetoric employed by the prime minister and several members of government but also many of their political supporters on social media there has been really an uddering of the sick especially when they are conveniently for that migrant workers or low or high low income earners the sick are treated as if they were perpetrators not victims and they are blamed for propagating the virus even labeled as anti patriotic so this kind of nationalism and moralism is not new in thailand and migrant workers and lower income segments of the population do not receive fair treatment of benefit from or they do not benefit from any safe spaces in normal time and in pandemic times there are even more at risk on top of this we also see um so this is for instance an image of a quarantine site that was specifically for migrant workers so the um other quarantine sites did not look like this at all um and also on top of this we also see a kind of paternalism um that is visible in particularly in access to medical supplies medicine and currently um importantly vaccines so in last year we saw some politicians hoarding masks and distributing to their constituents as a kind of bargaining chip for popularity and what we're talking about here are national supplies paid for by taxpayers monies probably and um and access should be at right not something that to be meant magnanimously gifted so some perhaps would also make the argument although that about the royal family donating medical supplies to hospitals at a time when they are facing harsh criticism and their role is being questioned but of course this cannot be discussed um openly in thailand as for instance a former leader of an opposition party was charged with les majesté law which includes harsh punishments for um criticise for raising questions about the role of a company largely owned by the king um that is central to the vaccine rollout so um do i still have time um or should i meet you at the time yeah so maybe we could yes just uh sort of um start to conclude so um we've seen so artists um unlike in other countries in europe for instance where we've seen movements of artists asking from their government to for covid measures um targeting that to to be adapted to or to um problems that artists are facing here in thailand um clearly the focus has been on the protests and on um counter hegemonic practices so we've seen the resurgence of the figure of the artist as an organizer so not only providing visual material but also um playing a key role in um organizing protests and also for instance here is an image of artists as they were about to be arrested and these were a group that were involved in the mapping of a protest village so a village that was set up in front of government house that had united some protesters coming from different places and that didn't were linked to different causes but that were joined together in front of the government house and this is as they were about to be arrested um but so and we've also seen a shedding or a blurring of um artists identities and protesters identities with a lot of um dark matter as Gregory Chalet would call them uh which is um um well memes and images being disseminated online um without anyone really taking ownership of them which is different from um a lot of artists who would make um exhibitions that had politics as subject matter uh that would exhibit under under their own names and galleries etc so as to also further their careers um yes and also um but now um I think in the past year we've been talking a lot about how whether we should or not um keep playing within the hegemonies arena or institutions or whether we should exit and create our own so this is um um of an open letter by artists that had participated in the bank of arbinale which is um sponsored by one of the patrons or the sponsors and backers of the military as well but this um and this open letter itself has also garnered criticism because people were then asking uh why why would you um take part in the first place and uh it was also rather a toothless letter that um did not really uh did not really I mean artists did not say they would pull out or anything um and so as we are entering probably another lockdown it could we could also be asking the question of since the formal art world and its institution have now adapted to the new normal what will happen to the in the case of protest based practices and these counter-agermanic practices in thailand then what happens after the protest dies down because of covid yes sorry this was a little bit long maybe all right and that was perfect thank you for delivering that paper it was really interesting to hear your perspective and to see what was going on in thailand um isabel if I could ask you to come back too um if we can get any questions from the audience please do post in the q and a um isabel um I think it's genuinely shocking um some of the material that you raise in your paper I suppose being here in London and so on um so many interesting questions not least on a personal level um I was interested in how well particularly those these artists that you refer to and and the careers that they went on to have is debate what was what was the reception of the work in the time of their making um I think it's fair to say that um you know uh sort of various broadcast bands um had significant impact um on many of those filmmakers and also I mean it's it's a constellation of situations um a constellation of creative forces versus difficult situations um so margo harkin is still an active filmmaker and she's currently researching and and making work about um the um women and babies homes in irelands which is a an ongoing uh which is an ongoing investigation into the catastrophe of and the you know human rights um brutality of of these homes that were set up in ireland for young women who were pregnant and um and they had their baby ceremony the babies were given away for adoption and you know others died under suspicious circumstances the investigation is ongoing so she's making work on that at the moment um she owns her own production she runs her own production company she does a lot of you know work fundraising to make the work um she had a lot of supporters like other you know that channel for workshop movement was incredible in the early 1980s really got behind um film cooperatives you know dairy but also another one in Belfast as well as other um you know collectives in in the UK um always prioritising um platforming voices that weren't were less heard so um so uh so it was a training ground provision of some uh you know core funding start-up funding and also some technical equipment so uh and angrili and margo harkin both continue to make work although um the the the banning of mother ireland I think was really um damaging to angrili's kind of ongoing careers as as a filmmaker both um I don't speak for her but uh from what I've you know interpreted and uh learned uh you know just uh very difficult as a filmmaker to go go you know go through that um so um and and that in itself the broadcasting ban and the stipulations around it from 1988 to 1991 is fascinating and I would encourage anyone who who's not aware of it to also look into that it was the banning of images and voices with uh republican sentiment uh from british airwaves um and to to kind of staggering degrees but um so yeah so that really impacted um the making of work although yeah pat murphy's still active margo harkin's still active and crilly's still vocal and and I suppose one thing um you know that's been a kind of interesting throughline across the foretalk so I meant to say in the beginning of mine it's a privilege to um be you know in such company as the other researchers and poets and artists and academics but one thing that's a priority now I think is the archiving and the starisation of this material and this comes back to um something that stella said about the digit digitisation of the archive it's something the tree is undertaking it's something that arianna is doing in practice um and you know and finding kind of safe spaces for that to start material which is vital to understanding um various histories that should also point out in case no if anyone's missed that the link to the petition is in the in the chat room so do have a look um arianne I wondered you mentioned or at least in some of the notes I've read of yours you mentioned something of a royal vaccine and I wondered if you could say something about what that was I was interested in um well it's actually it's a little delicate especially considering that this talk has been recorded and will then be uploaded online so I've been warned by several people to be careful when I speak about this but um it's essentially um it's the reason why tannathon dunoligit who's the former leader of an opposition party was um has been charged with les majeste because he has questioned um so the um the Thai government has signed a deal with um I think the laboratory um formulating AstraZeneca so that they will um right sorry let's let's read back from the article so that they will basically import or distribute this um the AstraZeneca vaccine through this Thai company of which the major shareholder is the king and tannathon dunoligit this politician has asked whether this um this company is really the best suited company to um to distribute the vaccine because it's not the company that has any particular experience in doing this um and therefore because there are straight les majeste laws in Thailand you cannot think uh the monarchy although this has been um vastly this law has been vastly misused and misinterpreted to uh quash dissent and to um to really um get rid of political opponents and political activity at the moment many political activists are still in jail awaiting trial and due to uh les majeste charges and so um and therefore um not this the AstraZeneca is now also in Thailand being dubbed a royal vaccine because it is distributed through um the king's um the king owned company and um therefore um some people as tannathon have been asking whether this was actually appropriate and whether the vaccine was just simply something that was um that should be of free access and not something to be distributed or to be viewed as a gift or as a donation in a kind of very feudalistic mentality or system yes if i could maybe ask everybody to open up their cameras and then we could maybe have a more of an open discussion at this point um it would be nice to see everyone again I hope we did if anyone had any further thoughts from the group um about any of the papers that have been presented so far Chris i wonder whether i could just uh dive in and and um just something that got me thinking as i was listening to um all the presentations and again it's like a privilege to hear the thoughts from you know many different places and perspectives but i was thinking um as um you all talking about different media through which these ideas are disseminated and presented um and ideas are articulated and often thinking like Isabel you were talking about tv workshops and broadcast media being um used and Shria obviously thinking about the digital as a space of collective archiving and seller social and around so talking about social media and imagery and i was thinking what how this will have an impact on the spaces of display of this kind of material when we do archive it and we do curate it and when we do historicize it and it seems that you know there's such incredible pressure at the moment on institutions and particularly the institutions connected to the art world museums and galleries whether you can imagine you know radical new forms of exhibition makings and display that will have to come out of this moment to account for and to historicize and and sort of re-visualize this material so i just wonder whether you had any thoughts about how there might be some pressure to change on the way in which we display images and other forms of art making and practice um just from a kind of local perspective i think there's um you know questions around language this is something that Stella talked about but language and classification of work um understanding that um you know border lines are drawn and then they're redrawn and what we do with national collections when particular areas are no longer i think this is something from my understanding that Tate Britain is looking at um in terms of collections of Irish work what do they do with those works when they were under British rule they are no longer how are those classified so they're kind of interesting um questions is the classification within organisations um and i think just from my perspective and it's something that's going on a lot in the larger institutions that have resources but this question of like where the work is and what's collected so um in you know in work that manifests as so many of the presentations have in this crossover between art and activism the the work sometimes sits in the correspondences and the campaigns and the social media campaigns again uh i don't know if Jane we've still got Jane Wells here on but she was this personally i've spoken to a lot um and was um last last night again about um her interactions and interactions between her and her campaigners with Stella Creasy this MP and you know that started on social media so the digital archive um yeah there's a lot of work and thought to go into it and i think this question of where is the work in practices like these that have political intent is a question that we constantly need to repose ourselves and definitely and obviously interesting in the context of framing this conversation from the Paul Mellon Centre of Studies in British Art and the questions we're having about you know what that signifies as well so thank you for those thoughts. If I may um I again drawing from Ariane's point about the the intersection between artists and activists and how sometimes there's a clear split sometimes there's none I think in the COVID-19 moment especially when artists are working or creating knowledge that is not necessarily valued as art for curation I find many times that some of the things we are doing resisting through art um have been declassified so the the idea of classification and declassification and what is valued as knowledge or worthy of curation many times I would want to see an archive of all the protest materials that are utilized I also have had students who've wanted to study my poetry of resistance and the university has said to them this is not academic material and um the gatekeepers of what's curatable what is theory what is theorizable what we can learn from many times um I'm saying something without knowing the language to say to say it but but do you know what I mean that that I think part of what digitizing does especially when it's done as an activist moment in the academy in the museum in in the exhibition in the digital world is to say we shall live and include this among the things that are worthy of of celebration of of history sizing of keeping for the next generation because sometimes when we're looking for theory we may not find it in in classical music but we might find it in ghetto street rhythms and so yeah um curation is also about creating boundaries and about attaching particular value judgments about the material that's being curated and I think a lot of it is very subjective but I think the COVID-19 moment allows us to bash these boundaries and borders and to rethink what is worthy of curation what is worthy of entering the archive and so for me digitization then becomes important because it's a huge space in terms of COVID-19 being a virus that that spreads through the air I think how we curate and how we approach the museum if it's going to be a space of infection and transmission and and passing on of germs and even possible death will be will be interesting and I think the last bit about archiving artistic moments like these when emotions such as grief and pain and suffering and disease and burial and not necessarily the celebration but but the other emotions that are not very positive it would be good to capture them because I think it's been languages like psychology and psychiatry and maybe medicine that have been able to capture the mind and the artistic expressions of people grieving a world grieving would be beautiful to capture and keep for posterity so curate the grief and the trauma and the deaths and the not knowing that I'd love somebody to be able to analyse what's happening in India currently and how we deal with that in terms of accessing it 20 years from today will be important I think just to speak to that that point the the temporal is also quite important in in this process of kind of digitization and archiving at this point but also thinking about how the how institutions can perhaps follow suit to some degree but also the fact that there is there is I think a time to collect and a time to reflect and how as projects as as institutions and so on how we can find that in between space where you know because I think sometimes it's just when you are grieving you are you you should have the time to agree you know and I think that that's quite important to think about as well in terms of how how we can create spaces different kinds of spaces when we're when we're thinking about what stays for future moments and I think the the other question that Isabel talked about in terms of national collections versus kind of global connections collections and connections I think as well is really something that I find dealing with more and more in terms of the fact that you know just how do you reconcile very very local events with the fact that that something that's very local is implicated in something that's national very often you know sort of modes of resistance against a national government and so on but this is then also implicated in larger chains of geopolitical relations and and how to in some sense think about all of them at the same time so this multi-scalarity I think is I find really helpful yeah and there's some work in like picking the sort of national paradigm as a collection model from the museum like or or or freeing the museum of that kind of sort of national thinking and actually you know really attending to minorities attending to localities attending to these you know the chorus is a nine that's come up I think amongst all of us but yeah I think it's quite funny because I really came to this talk already in my head apologising for bringing such a local or localised point of view and then finally finding so many connections with the other presentations and that was just such a beautiful moment after a year in local isolation but also regarding maybe archiving and digitising also in terms of artistic practices that are at the intersection of politics also a lot of the focus in the past has been on the visual components and and also of the protest and not so much on the idea of the protest itself or the more the project-based histories and and I think personally I would like to to focus on trying to to keep those perhaps not so much in collections but at least keep them alive and going through through COVID and which makes those projects impossible to realise outside or in public spaces and how to keep those how to keep those alive and these times something We have one question from an audience member, Keith Mahoney, who asks how do you feel enough has been done across the industry to prevent closure of art spaces inside different but I think in light of the effects of the pandemic numerous spaces have closed due to lack of audiences finances money etc I mean in this country there seems to be a fairly exaggerated lack of you know support across the industry that's not to say you know there are great instances I think of of organisations who have been able to survive but yeah I don't think it's high on the conservative agenda to be maintaining cultural work at the moment which is all the more reason that panels like this and groups coming together to try and brainstorm I'm sorry to not have a more cohesive answer on that one Well no it's reflected in the fact that museums aren't open to the 17th of May Exactly commercial galleries can sell so they're open early museums you know in the public interest that can wait yeah but yeah I wanted to ask you know it's I mean in a way the pandemic obviously it's exacerbated all the structural issues that underpin much of life beforehand so instances of racism and so on and even you know all these issues that are embedded in society it's in terms of your website how have you I mean the ethics and the approach to that it's a very big question I'm asking perhaps at the end of this conversation I was interested in knowing a little bit about how you approach the subjective representation of those issues and how you point about that as a strategy is there a way you've sort of thought through this subject? I'm not sure I 100% understand the question but I think how we understand larger structural issues yeah well I think the idea is that there's multiple levels of what we put on the website so some of it is kind of an artist contribution that is a political cartoon or something like that and then we often invite somebody to write a little piece about it and I think it's in that those reflections where you can actually make the connections to already existing longer term structural inequalities and things like that so to really kind of get to thinking about very specific things in the pandemic but from different perspectives if that makes any sense so that there are ways in which you can create these you know create these holes as a way to think more broadly about the past and the future as well as you know something that's very rooted in the present does that answer your question? Yeah in terms of then how you're fielding or soliciting responses to the website are you charting that yourself are you kind of inviting people or is that an open invitation and all? Yeah this is a really good question so at the moment where it's invitation only just because we are such a small team we can't really have an open call but at the same time it's also we are asking people we're talking to people it's spaces like this talking to people about what the project is and then asking for people to write to us with you know kind of if they're interested in contributing but the plan is that as we grow to have research fellows or research curators who then are able to reach a larger from different parts of the world as well who are then able to reach larger communities not communities but larger numbers of smaller communities if that makes sense but for the moment there is no open call um but I hope at some point we might have the um the kind of team strength uh uh to have something on any final thoughts or comments here and otherwise I think we can maybe draw a close but I just want to say thank you and what an amazing group of contributors to you Chris and to Paul Mellon thank you pleasure it's always lovely to see you Isabel I should say and everybody um thank you so much for taking part it's an honour to hear all of your contributions today as I'm sure everybody here is applauding in the audience if they could silent the digital world safe in the knowledge we can't hear if they're not moment actually isn't it at the end of events where you know we know there's the community of people joining us and connecting with us but uh you know we we hope you can feel the energy of the of the discussion and our ideas and and they've come back to us as well through the the chat and you know links that have been sent but it's been really I love sure you as um phrase a time to collect and a time to reflect and it made me just really think about the importance of spaces to to share ideas and thoughts in in progress as well you know it's like so it's sort of not final words but opening out discussions and you know thinking and rethinking so I just really appreciated listening and being part of that discussion thank you so much for the invitation and it was really great to hear everyone's um thoughts and comments from different parts of the world yeah and it also is just virtually meet meet all of you thank you and I guess at this moment we say you know as well as thank you so much to our to our panellists um and to Chris for bringing us all together um but also to to the audience for joining us but we hope that you'll come back tomorrow because we have another event at the at the same time and again that will give us a further space in which to carry on these discussions and and think about them through a different lens of um of wearing out but we hope that you will have the energy to join us again tomorrow for for the discussions so um we'll we'll gather um tomorrow at one o'clock thank you so much thank you so much bye thank you