It is almost October, and when 2020 started months ago nobody would guess how this year was going to unfold. Even in March, when Corona-virus hit New York, we did not guess for so long it would last. How many changes happened to us? Have us realized that? Is it possible to perceive these ongoing transformations that are taking place in every single level of our lives? The whole world is spinning in a huge transformative process, and yet, most of us have accompanied it from home. Unexpectedly, life, work, meetings, celebrations and losses were amalgamated in our homes. Every social sphere of our lives came inside our homes. And we have watched that from our windows. And from our windows, we have watched and connected other places.
It is from our windows, we saw the world slowing down, while we heard ambulances. It was from our windows that we decided to take pets from shelters. From our windows, we received emails informing that Cuny was going to be closed, and we thought about the books we left in our lockers. It was from our windows we had to learn how to be completely online, even those who have hated online-ness. From our windows, we saw empty streets, and huge protests taking the streets over. Maybe, from our windows we cried, we laughed in a zoom meeting with silly friends. We have taught and we have learned. Even the most advanced professor became a student again.
From my window … and other places is a TLC sense-making project that intends to document, create space of expression, connection and identifications, a community of reflections of what happened with each of us and all of all over the last months, from our windows. Focusing on the Graduate Center Cuny community (???), this project wants to invite our academic community to reflect and elaborate the social, psychological, political transformations we all facing as educators and students.
Using visual and textual languages, From my window…and other places is an open-ended project to host different forms of expression. Photos, sketches, elaborated drawings, watercolor images can be created, combined or not with texts to express how each of us has lived this process that is at the same global and singular experience. Poems, essays, excerpts, notes from our diaries, every form of expression will be welcome.
As we are not an isolated island, even in our most isolated moments, we have accompanied the flow of the pandemic from place-to-place. We all have people in other places, and we probably talked to them while we were inside our places looking outside from our windows. As the pandemic moved around, our concerns moved along, from person to person, from place to place, country to country. We have followed it. From our windows, connected to other places, we probably saw the babies of our friends being born and we missed the possibility of holding them. From our windows, connected to other places, many of us celebrate our birthdays or others’ people’s birthdays. And it was probably from there, from our windows and other places, that we shared our major uncertainties and accomplishments.
This density of overlapping experiences, full of complex and transient feelings that this project pretends to host, creating a collective and individual sense-making space that can preserve this process for the years to come. What we have been learning and how we have been learning from this radical experience is what this project aims to “capture”.
