The SAR-CoV-2 pandemic is responsible for more than 3 million deaths worldwide. Its effects are long-term; it is difficult to know exactly how long we will be dealing with them. No one fully knows or can predict this. It was hard to predict from the beginning what the post-pandemic landscape of the globe would be, whether we would recover quickly. The most important thing was the reflexes of positive behaviour. Help, solidarity, a desire to provide relief to those most affected and heartbroken. Many did not know how to behave, how to deal with this sudden situation. After a few months of slowing down, we longed for the times before the pandemic, it seemed to us a ‘lost good’. We missed the most important things: direct contact with loved ones or other people, a direct handshake or looking another person in the eye with love. For the things that cannot be bought, the things that testify to the quality of life. Lockdown, made us realise how we are a society in need of social connections.
An intermedia exhibition using fine analogue and digital photographic techniques, the ‘Renewal’ project presents reflections on the encounter of people from a wide spectrum of society with SAR-CoV-2. What has changed in their ‘Inner Landscape’, in their lives , in their perception of the world, what has ended? and what has begun? Using the medium of image and word, I reach into these intimate spaces of experience to release them.
Worlds don’t end
Man ends and begins anew
An endless dance of darkness with light
The closer to the lips of the one who carries the night within, the more alive man is
From her kisses lost bodies – for a moment and for eternity
Too bold flirtatiousness frightened people
The rooms burn in a lonely malaise
And breasts sink into the depths of the soul
People like dogs on chains far from the master
They ended their lives although the ball gown was not caressed
And those who were born again cautiously lifted their eyelids
Tasted the gifted seconds uncertainly
They came out of the caves – resurrectio mortuorum
And to me, these drops of silence from ever under the eyelids
Under the dead clock for years without a warm body
And the world did not begin for me
Only formerly the pages soiled with thoughts were
And the hand more capable
Inspired by virgin dying
Greatly fertile death was – the poems of her children
And now the temptress barren has hidden in the mist
Abandoned her hand into the endless white
Stiff and motionless devoid of memory
She no longer smells human – unnaturally cold
And that’s why I long for the one that my hands
In her warm blood adorned
And now no longer a poet but a recovering man over a blank page
– Everything has already been / Piotr Nowak
