Arcipelago Covid 19. Per un atlante visuale, e sociale, della pandemia

Abstract

In spring 2020 we experienced an extraordinary virtual and relational proximity in the environments of our digital homes. The image, the one that narrated and lived, experienced the pandemic epidermally, completely broke discontinuity between virtual and physical spaces, resolving itself into a space od tactile continuity, even before audio and visual. The title of this article, Covid Archipelago 19, directly recalls one of the digital visual storytelling experiences born in March 2020, in full pandemic explosion, from the need to tell live, choral and plural, our country in an extraordinary historical moment. Conceived by a group of Italian photographers, the project focuses on the visual story and involved a hundred gazes scattered throughout the territory, converging in the social life spaces of digital platforms and witnessing a much wider phenomenon during the pandemic. The intense months of lockdown in Italy can be explored and told through a complex visual mosaic that is no longer and is not just a mainstream media perspective, with a controlled and univocal imaginary perception, but recalling an inhomogeneous, polyphonic atlas, relocated into a new media experience, elaborating an incomplete and partial gaze, multi-perspective, with digital and open optics, montage of an immense archive, difficult to control. This essay chooses an approach that mainly uses media studies and visual studies, taking media history and archeology as a reference point, exploring and experiencing a new perceptual regime, in digital flaneuristic immersion.