Stories of effort
The space of my quarantine
Extraordinary times ask for unique ways for being portrayed. Polaroids were the only thing that we had inside the house during quarantine and we used them as precious seeds, constantly measuring the number of films left. The irony of all is that there were no extraordinary things to do during this extraordinary time and everything went by like usual.
The only thing that changed, at least the perception of it, was space. Rooms became larger, bigger and sometimes smaller. The kitchen was the land of the computers, the office and the dining hall at once, the balcony became a square without pigeons and strangers, that is what we always wanted and dreamed of from a square, and the bed, of course, in the great tradition of misused and hackneyed metaphors, was an island, where everything came together, the books and the food, the flowers and the handsanitizer.
These snapshots are, as a matter of fact, a way of making sense of this peculiar moment in time when places spoke more than us, who just happened to be there in their presence.
Marco Grasso, 27th March 2020, Bologna, Italy
