Co-Remembering Covid
Co-Remembering Covid in Teams: Revisiting Art School Lockdown through Creative Co-production , the latest Art Activisms public event takes place this week. Lisa Metherell and Cathy Wade discuss their ongoing collaboration to creatively unpack experiences of Covid lockdown as carers and lecturers in Higher Education in order to help understand where we are today
Wednesday 28 January, 2 - 3pm at Birmingham School of Art, Margaret Street ,B3 3BX
In looking and ‘feeling backward’, they take seriously Heather Love’s suggestion of ‘tarrying’ (2007:151) with the moods and emotions associated with the past because of the powerful hold they can have on us in the present.
They have been co-remembering and charting points of collapse, precarity, failure, trauma and joy through revisiting the UK Covid lockdown timeline in conjunction with contemporaneous personal//institutional digital archives. They have been talking, writing collaboratively and image making. Reflecting on the ethical urgency of co-remembering and creative collaboration today, they argue that there can be no neat conclusions as to the effects of Covid, and of earlier traumas, because they are complex and ongoing.
Cathy Wade is an artist and writer who engages with practices that are created and distributed within collaborative partnerships, through experimental pedagogies and commons. Their work seeks to understand the experience of our contemporary conditions through direct exchange with others.
Lisa Metherell is a Senior Lecturer in Art and Design and Research Degree Coordinator, supporting PhD students. She also co-leads the Art Activisms research cluster. Lisa’s research is particularly informed by the tensions between queer theory and phenomenology and how what we ‘know’ might be usefully troubled by what we ‘feel’. She is interested in the challenges of caring well in difficult times; the limitations of language for marginalised subjects and how art practice has the potential to create representational complexity. Other interests include fabulation, secret languages, kinship and vulnerability. She also writes about werewolves.