Nishant Shah
… of converging and separating different alive and life-making units
On the streets of Arnhem, when The Netherlands implemented an ‘intelligent shutdown’, which meant that we were arbitrarily allowed to be in small groups in public but nowhere else, Anushka Nair, a performing artist, set up a long durational performance art.
She invited walkers by in the streets of Arnhem to sit down on the street with her, adequately masked and socially distanced, to take a grain of rice and write a name on it. She had a long list of names – names of migrant and unorganized laborers in India, who had died, during the COVID19 pandemic, not because of the virus, but because of the forced migration that led to tens of thousands of people walking back to their homes, because the infrastructure of mobility and migration had halted and the government regulation did not accommodate people who did not have a home to shelter in.
Nair, who, like me, is from India, invited people to write the names of these migrant workers who were at the risk of becoming another statistical index of death in the face of the pandemic, as a recognition that it was technologies of management – not the invention of new technologies but the shutting down of existing transportation technologies that were invoked to make people converge and separate.
In the act of writing a foreign name, far away, of people who died, trying to make their way home, she introduced the grain of rice and a sharp pen and tweezers as pandemic technologies that both recognized the technologies of separation and the technologies that make us connected, not just with people we zoomed and facetimed with, but also strangers who shared the collective global experience of COVID19, in ways that we could never imagine.
The imagined migrant worker, made human in their name, written by foreign hands by people in Arnhem who would never meet such people, formed a strange sense of connection that give an example of the multiple technologies – not technology as a singular but technologies as an intersecting grid of means and intentions – that I would think are pandemic technologies.
In times when we were all forcibly separated in the name of social distancing, it is important to realise that the technologies that we took to, as technologies of connection were also technologies of separation. When we taught students on zoom, it wasn’t managing connectivity but distancing. When we wished farewell to people we loved who were dying, or when we attended friends’ weddings and witnessed new life coming into the world, these were all technologies that were reminding us that we can connect, precisely because we were separated, and pandemic technologies are marked by this double edge.
Image by piranka from Getty Images