We spent the lockdown in our old house, the house where our children were born, a small house with no balcony. Like all other parents, in our own situation, we spent our days learning new rhythms and new habits.
Every evening at 8.00 pm we looked out at the window to applaud doctors and nurses from all over the world, it was a moment of sociality, a moment of resistance between neighbours, a moment of understanding and glances between all of us parents in this condition of alienating isolation.
The days passed with love, boredom, anger, fear, frustration, calm, joy, claustrophobia, sadness and still a lot of love.
LOCKDOWN SERIES
This work follows the course of my anxiety as a mother and as a chronically ill (immunosuppressed) patient caused by the Covid 19 pandemic in Spain and Europe during 2020.
On February 25, 2020, after the chain of events, deaths and infections that occurred in Italy, caused by Covide 19, with my wife and our two children, due to my immunosuppression, we decided to confine ourselves at home. As we began our lockdown, the rest of the city and nation continued a normal life. The virus seemed so far away, there was no talk of a pandemic, it seemed an isolated case to China and Italy.
When we communicated this decision to friends and family, we were ridiculed, they gave us paranoid, conspiratorial and ridiculous. All friends said: but it's just an influence.
But I was afraid. When you have a chronic illness, when your immune system is compromised, any external catastrophe generates anxiety.
After 15 days, Spain also decreed a state of emergency, on March 15 we were all in lockdown. This chain of events has created not only collective anxiety at the population level, but above all personal: as a mother of two 3-year-old children, chronically ill with a very high rate of death if I had caught Covid, it generated in me a constant sense of panic. I always sought a balance between being constructive for the safety of my children (who would be locked in the house for 3 months) and desperation to know that if I contracted the virus I would probably die.
I stayed at home, never going out, from 25 February 2020 to 10 May 2020. On 10 May I went out for the first time, I looked at the sky, the clouds and the trees blooming, it was already late spring. I cried.
Year
2020 / ONGOING
Throughout 2020 I have collected through my Fuji 35mm and my iPhone a domestic landscape that seems motionless, but in reality is constantly changing.
I started photographing and making videos of our confinement a few days before the alarm began. At first I started taking pictures to keep my mind busy, and then I realised that this chapter too would be one of the chapters of my autobiographical project. After the first few weeks I become something necessary for my well-being. I photographed and continue to photograph this new way of life every day. The domestic landscape gradually transformed into an urban landscape and then into a more complex landscape. These images will accompany me for the rest of my life.
All the images tell phases of the personal and family evolution of this lockdown, through the changing of emotions, seasons, days, climate and the virus. In all these months, I have been telling and I am talking about our personal family "ecosystem" which, like all other ecosystems, changes and is influenced by great external changes.
More
If you want to see more photos and follow the project process, please follow Lockdown Series on my Instagram profile
Selfportrait, 85 Days at home, without ever leaving home.
During the first confinement I asked myself: what does it mean to inhabit a space? I realised that we are "rooted" in the house. The house has become a protected place, a safe place, a place to "stay inside", like a shell.
Then in late April, the Spanish government decided that children could go out for one hour a day, within a kilometre of a neighbourhood. My children came out of the "shell" before me, I saw them come out the window, with their masks, gloves and a mixture of happiness and fear in their eyes.
Then finally in May we all went out together, little by little we regained possession of the streets, squares and playgrounds at the end of June.
I decided to follow my story, because even if this first difficult phase of the pandemic was over, a new confinement followed, the perimeter of the neighbourhood and then of the city.
The rediscovery of urban spaces and tourist places at our total disposal were important moments for the transition to a new normal life
Then came September, autumn and the move to the new home, our home!
Schools reopened in September, we decided not to send them to school. And then the second wave of this crazy virus came back, the city closed, the curfew began. Then, came the third wave, still dead, still contagious, still catastrophe.
We were at home, but in a new home. And so we have experienced our confinements of these new waves of the virus in a new place, a different domestic landscape but always in motion. We celebrated birthdays, my 40 years, anniversaries through computer screens, through applications that gave the illusion of not being far from our loved ones.
New seasons, new events, new situations, but always in this stillness caused by the pandemic.
Silvia started a new job in smart working, and I started spending my days alone with Noah and Victoria. Our daily explorations have become part of this project, our days at the playgrounds. My dialogues with other mothers, the sharing of anxieties and worries.
I recorded video and audio of my days.
We spent weekends in the mountains or by the sea, but always within the perimeter of the city. The limits have influenced our mood, our well-being, our body.
And then the winter, and then more infections, deaths and fear. And still at home, still all together living in a place, with the same feeling of anxiety that does not leave us.
And then comes the vaccine. As a vulnerable person, I was among the first in the population after health workers to be vaccinated. The first dose arrives and then the second one that knocks me out.
And again the curfew and the evenings in the dark at the window listening to the wind, the ambulances, the motorcycles of the riders and the night buses.
449 days. and here we are again.
