Reflections on COVID-19: We’re All About to Become Mothers Now
Our highly illuminated commercial and business districts have gone dark. The world’s 24/7 economy has come to a screeching halt. But in this darkness in which our hyper-productive and hyper-efficient systems are suffering, nature is healing.
In the last year’s Broken Nature Exhibition in Milan’s Triennale di Milano and Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut in the Dutch pavilion’s “I See That I See What You Don’t See” featured works from designers, artists, and researchers from the Netherlands presenting a layered picture of the current multispecies relationship with darkness, setting in motion imaginative critical responses to it. The research, films, performances, sound and scent-scapes together form a viewing mechanism that evidences how current modes of understanding the environment are designed, and how they could therefore be redesigned.
The Netherlands is one of the most illuminated countries on the globe. Its productive landscape - characterized by data, technology and energy - illustrates a 24/7 economy that emphasizes efficiency and growth. In this hyperproductive, hyper-illuminated landscape, our relationship with light and darkness have changed. In a world that is always switched on, the traditional dichotomy between day and night no longer seems relevant in terms of productivity, while the experience of clear, starry skies has become a rarity.
In this context, the project aimed for an understanding of the contrasting effects of light access, deprivation and overexposure on different bodies; the influence of radiation on human and non-human behaviours; the impact of the maximization of the land through lighting technologies for year-long crops and floriculture production; the coexistence with the invisible yet pervasive architecture of the digital; the perception of instances of synchronicity with the cosmos; and the role of design in these realms. In this context, darkness, then, is not a condition for suffering but instead, the circumstance needed for nature and ourselves to heal; let us liken darkness to closing our eyes in meditation or sleep, where our bodies and minds restore themselves as we rest. And in our stillness, let’s make the most of this opportunity to incubate ideas that will transform the way we work, the way we transact and the ways in which we relate to one another and the world around us.
Over the past few months, I’ve been having recurring dreams of a beautiful little girl. Giving birth to her, feeding her, dancing with her and quite funnily, teaching her capoeira! I thought that maybe I was feeling the spirit of a baby girl around me waiting to come through. I thought that it was literally my subconscious telling me that if I ever got pregnant I would have a daughter, but this isn’t at all relevant to me at the moment. Upon reflecting on it for some time, I’m realizing that it’s not quite that literal. Beautiful young girls are a symbol of hope and I’m hopeful that good might emerge from the birth pangs we’re experiencing today in the forms of social distancing, isolation and economic collapse.
If capitalism is a pregnancy, we are in labor. Our ways of being -- the ways we have used money, technology and each other -- have been so unsustainable up to this point, but they may not have all been in vain. We’ve reached the 9-month threshold -- an inflection point -- and now we’re about to deliver a child. As it turns out, darkness is also, from the perspective of an unborn baby, what it looks like in a mother's womb before birth.
So now, we must ask ourselves, when we finally have our new daughter to cradle in our arms, what are the things we want to teach her and on which values do we want to raise her? Because what the world that follows will look like will solely depend on how we nurture it. So breathe. But ready your vaginas. And hold tightly onto each other's hands. If there’s anything we can learn from biology, it’s that this is not the apocalypse. If we are simply the microcosms of macrocosms, this is just the beginning of a new life, a liminal space from which it is possible to emerge in symbiosis, with ourselves, each other and the world around us, in the hopes that this pandemic leaves us better than we were before it arrived: more selfless, more loving and more attuned.