ABSTRACT
This essay theorises an AgoraGothic, a Gothic of the empty, open spaces captured in the photographic essay, `The Great Empty' in the New York Times, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decolonised spaces of metropolises, as humans were locked in, are an iteration of the colonial condition of the terra nullius, but also of the res nullius, abandoned by its owner and ready for occupation by others. The agora is haunted, with two registers of decolonisation: of losing human domination over built and natural spaces, and the return of the repressed nonhuman Other. As humans cower inside, the wait is interminable, as the virus stalks the outside.
ABSTRACT
This essay examines several photographs taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021. It argues that the photographs capture an “atmo-terror” (terror from the air). The paper records the evolution of atmo-technics: alongside the dehumanization of the patient/sufferer, acts of resilience were reported and recorded. A “civil contract” of photography may be inferred from them. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary–and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy’s murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy’s inversion of the superhero mythology. With the employment of conventional disease-vector images, such as those of rats, Banksy brings into the human 5dwelling a “postnatural wilderness” showing the reversal of the disruption of ecosystems that had rendered animals habitat-less in India, with animals once again entering human spaces. Hence, the pandemic’s inversion of spatialized distribution of life can be seen as a decolonial and decolonizing moment. Subsequently, the article highlights how COVID-19 art intervenes through its parodic, kitschy quality, in the discourses around the pandemic. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.