Encounters in Quarantine

Shared concerns. The necessary plunge into the unpredictable. The present condition is a reflection of the past and can become the transformation of the future - even though this space-time seems compressed.

What eludes us?

Perhaps the importance of accepting that the pandemic is not democratic. The current scenario has made evident what was being attempted to conceal, highlighting the need to slow down the pace of our daily lives, to value the importance of our gaze towards others, and to disrupt the ties of the normative system in which economic, political, and social differences are immense.

Addressing the concept of privilege is crucial.

Privilege only exists by guaranteeing the existence of its opposite. Understanding this duality is a step towards comprehending the discursive structure that orders our socio-economic system and makes us believe that social disparities are natural, and intrinsic to the human condition. In reality,  the narrative we live in creates this unequal arrangement. This very system makes the crisis necessary and takes advantage of it to deepen inequality.

There is a brief period between the last global economic crisis and the impending crisis. The difference seems to lie in the unpredictability of this moment. We are in a moment of expectancy. In a place of certain possibilities. Even though freedom is formally conditioned, it is worth questioning to what extent we were and are free. And if so, who is?

The current moment has exposed the open wounds of an unsustainable logic in which life is managed between production and consumption. There is a long way to go.

We will seek different narratives of the common, the sharing and the exchange. This is the moment to expose all the open wounds, either healing or deepening them. Give voice to those who are silenced. Listen attentively to those who claim their space. Observe the details, the subtext. Recognise and think of the city as a space of encounter, acceptance of the other and freedom.

The Encontros em Quarentena (Encounters in Quarantine) emerges as a space for dialogue between ateliermob and guests from different fields who, even before the pandemic, were facing the problems of the city, resistance, and the search for a future in cooperation.