Page 103 - Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!

exchange.
Publicly-available Big Data, collated from medical data country by country, is available online in a league table format. Countries are ranked from ‘bottom to top’ according to their daily tally
of cases, recovery rates, and deaths. During the early months of the pandemic, many people became obsessed with checking the daily league tables of the spread and the movements of each country up and down the table rankings. These subversive rankings became a summarising impact of the virus and presented a table of scales of infection.
For Chaosgraph: Scales of Infection, Linda and alys translated Big Data into acts of care and protection through collaboration determined by the limited availability of the porous borders between Australia and New Zealand. Using the postal service, Linda and alys collaborated through and with the exchange of a length of silk that was stitched into and then made the centerpiece of a repeated choreography involving the neighbours and friends living along alys’s driveway, or close by her house, as the work was made in severe lock-down conditions over 18 months of posting the silk back and forth, between New Zealand and Australia. The resultant choreographed video works are a portrait of diverse human bodies (diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, background) being overwhelmed by a global force, one after the other. Collectively this modest exchange created a work that brings attention to the complexity that Big Data conceals: the personal, the biological, and the material impacts of living during a global pandemic. We re-complicated the reductive Big Data and easily-digestible infographic league table and produced a chaosgraph, thick with specific, small-scale information and personal experience.
Moving from ranking ten to one, the outline of each country was stitched onto the silk from domestic textile items. These included covers made from working fabrics: linen, and cotton, that have already been stitched and embellished by anonymous makers much like the frontline workers in hospitals and care services. As each country was added, the silk was posted to alys, and a small gestural choreography work was performed with the silk, after which it was posted back to Linda to add another country.
The performative interactions and modest exchange of the silk through the post have an ordinariness that belies the extraordinary global shift that the virus has caused. The gentle, modest movements that were performed and stitched generate a commentary on the tenuous control we have over a slippery, evasive, and unpredictable virus, no matter how we try to reduce it to numeric columns in a statistical table. The seemingly insignificant interactions with the silk and the postal exchanges present a work with a sense of calm, gentleness, and slow progress; however, the contrast between the tension in the bodies and the easy slipperiness
of the silk, the delicate stitching of the hands and the threatening sharpness of the pins acknowledges the rapid spread and frantic activity the virus provoked. Chaosgraph: Scales of Infection is a performative work that calls us to remember the personal experiences of a global pandemic and the vital importance of being together in any way that we can.
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