Cont - Act

CONT - ACT: THERAPEUTIC COMMUNICATING ARTIFACTS

SHARING ANXIETY TO KEEP FEAR AT BAY

The emergency we are experiencing, regardless of the dramatic daily chronicles, needs to be narrated. The way the experience is told and reported is fundamental in determining the perception we have of it and the kind of response - individual and collective, intimate and social - that we are able to formulate. For this reason, with the aim of providing everyone with a virtual place in which to give shape and to share how the pandemic is lived, IULM encourages everyone - students, teachers, technical-administrative staff, citizens, web surfers - to take part in a collective narrative that keeps the feeling of community alive and that testifies to these dark days when the threat and the fear are over.

Three narrative threads are proposed:

1. Survival Things

What things do we rely on? What do we need during the lockdown?
What is the salvific object that assists us, supports us and helps us during this period of solitude and exile from the world?
Is it a book? Is it the computer? Is it a CD? Is it a theological symbol? Is it a souvenir? Is it a pot? Is it a cell phone? The refrigerator? The oven? A photograph?
We ask you to shoot a vertical format video, of a maximum of 50 seconds, that narrates an object, its functional but also emotional dimension, the way we communicate with it.
Send the video to [email protected]

2. Windows

A boundary between inside and outside, between in and out, between security and threat. The windows of our homes have once again become - in these times of isolation - the true thresholds of our relationship with the world. They are the place from which the true collective gaze of Italy, still alive and vital even if suffering and wounded, looks upon things. So we are asking you to show us what are the views that are your companions during yourd daily life in these times and what are the thoughts taking shapes from the landscape you see. In the end, from the sum of each view will be born the unique horizon that will have united us, however scattered. Share your view in a vertical format video, lasting a maximum of 50 seconds. Send the video to [email protected]

3. Mask

The virus forces us to set boundaries and protections between us, our bodies, and the invisible enemy that could be a few feet away from us. Masks, goggles, gloves, glasses, helmets, scarves: everyone protects himself as he can. He/she defends and himself/herself. We would like to collect a photo gallery of the body protections with which we humans have tried to keep the contagion away. These can be images taken on purpose, or found on the web, free of copyright or having care to state the source from which they are taken.
The images should be sent to [email protected]

The best works will be published with the author's signature on the Instagram CONT-ACT page (Contact_IULM) and made available to everyone. It is possible to participate in more than one submission, even in all three.
Once all these views have been collected, and when the dramatic emergency is over, it will be right and important to look back to where we all looked, where we decided to lean out, from the North and South, where we have set our perspective for a long time. We will celebrate the end of the emergency by transforming these works into therapeutic communicating artifacts: a photographic exhibition, a video installation, a choral film. To remember that the real scenery that remains, after all, is always what we create. Together.