Pandemic Projects
Funded by the Wellcome Trust and the King’s Together Multi and Interdisciplinary Research Scheme at King’s College, London.
The COVID-19 pandemic has given new voice to some of the most profound and fundamental epistemological problems of health care. Though some of these are directly related to how healthcare systems work, the novel coronavirus has also articulated the tensions concerning the nature and reliability of expertise and evidence, two critical mainstays of 20th-21st century medical and scientific knowledge-making. Who gets to produce, analyse and demand compliance to evidence? How does one verify the accuracy, or at least the utility, of this evidence? We aim to think through these questions, focusing our attention on the contemporary crises over evidence and expertise via one object – masks; one government directive – ‘sheltering in place’ or quarantining; and one pressing question: how do we parse scientific knowledge, judging what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ in a ‘novel’ situation, where nothing is for sure, and where only time has anything determinative to tell?
Led by several of the HS artist collaborators, we explore these issues, along the way trialing the unique ‘mixed methodology’ of artistic and scholarly research that has been a goal of the project from its inception. We hope in this way especially to offer vivid new perspectives on our pandemic moment, while also exploring the longer, larger arguments about the nature of evidence and expertise when it comes to our health.
MASK me anything
Led by Geoffrey Rees + Lucas Canino
Ah, the humble mask. Easy enough to fashion, at least in a rudimentary way. An early 20th century pattern for a DIY mask called for little more than a lot of folding, various layers of gauze held together only by the few stitches that attached ties to the mask. Even more rudimentary: a handkerchief tied around the face, to direct exhalations from the mouth and nose downward. A windscreen for the face was another idea, make of plastic or, as a mid-century public information campaign had it, even a piece of paper. And why not a mask attached to your hat, as a kind of scarf or veil? For those invested in high fashion, this was surely the answer.
Despite the seemingly endless everyday objects one could fashion into a mask, mask wearing itself has been a bumpy road. One recurring theme has been that we don’t have enough evidence for its effectiveness, and so each generation must test again how well masks work, based on new criteria for what success would look like. In certain places, national identity and individualism have been intoned: no government - no expert - is going to determine whether or not I cover my face. But why, when government circumscribe so much else in daily life, draw the line at a piece of cloth stretched over nose and mouth?
Health(Y) Spaces
Led by Helmie Stil
Reportedly, it was in the 14th century that the practices of quarantining began, as a way to prevent epidemics from spreading along the critical shipping routes that carried animals, peoples and things (and germs) from place to place. 700 or so years later, we’re still doing it. Do we chalk this up to tried and true?
Until just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, public health officials didn’t think so, generally voicing the opinion that quarantining was archaic, that advances in science and medicine had rendered quarantining unnecessary, that a modern public would never accept such limitations on their lives and freedoms. Yet, here we just have been: whether you call it lockdown, social isolation or “sheltering in place,” we quarantined for months. how is it that a practice over half a century old that until recently seemed so totally antiquarian, could suddenly become au courant? What do we make of our sudden embrace of what looks like anachronism?
The Wrong Project (PREFACE)
Led by A.R. Hopwood
Our sense of the pandemic has vacillated widely, from no threat at all in the early days, to a disaster of monumental proportions for so many. We have agonised over the simplest of all virus protectors, the face mask, protesting that the evidence involved is too murky, as if mask-wearing were not fraught primarily for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence. And we should have realised what the sceptic always knows, that we will only really know what happened in retrospect, though even then our memories, collective and personal, will play tricks.
A.R. Hopwood’s online exhibition is now live! Click here to go to the Wrong Project (preface) site.
