APRIL - A WhatsApp performance

"We wanted to talk about intimacy and friendship and touch in the time of a global pandemic. I guess we don’t really need to explain the situation as we are all living in it, but you know… the reduced contacts, the hesitation of proximity, the decision of who to see and when to see them, who to touch, who to sleep with, who to keep distance from. In order to think about how these social choreographies of the pandemic—that denote the body as the dangerous, leaking, unstable ground for viral war—are changing, for better or worse, the models of friendship that we participate in and perform.

In the beginning, we were naive and kept talking about afterward, you know when things would go back to normal, when things feel easy and fluid and the self-consciousness we now walk around with would start to reside and we would cough at the supermarket, something which now seems heinous. But of course, after is a fiction, it is a way of narrating the present moment to make it more bearable. We are here, in this intensely banal open stretch of now-time and our relationships are becoming different because of it. Even if there would be maskless faces in public and no limitations on house guests, we have carried these social choreographies in our bodies and they remain, if not our present, memories written into our bodies, a defining history."