out of isolation: artists respond to covid-19

As the world continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, many unique tensions, fears and doubts about the future have arisen. out of isolation: artists respond to covid-19 brings together artists' creative, critical and personal responses on the significance of the pandemic to their respective localities and contexts—what kinds of inequalities and injustices have the crisis laid bare, and what changes does the world need? If the origin of the virus is bound in an ecological web, what forms of climate action and mutual aid are necessary, now more than ever? Written as the crisis plays out before us, the series aims to spark conversation about how we might move forward from here.

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown and management measures have created ripple effects that bring into focus questions surrounding care, vulnerability and even survival. In this article, ila and Samantha share correspondence that reveals how they have attempted to navigate these fraught times and often intimate issues, testifying to the importance of the written word and its power to bring insight and comfort. ila is a visual and performance artist who combines objects, moving images and live performances in her intimate works, creating alternative nodes of experience and entry points into the peripheries of the unspoken, the tacit and the silenced. Using her body as a space of tension, negotiation and confrontation, her works generate discussion about gender, history and identity in relation to pressing contemporary issues. Samantha Yap is interested in forms of reciprocity such as the ethics of care, love and vulnerability as well as the exploration of feminist perspectives across writing and visual culture. She shuffles between writing, curation and project management. 

Letters between ila and Sam

18 Nov 2020, 01:33

Dearest Sam,

How have you been?

It's been a while since we had one of our conversations. I remember clearly pressing my elbows on the pram as I pushed Inaya on our long walks during circuit breaker, as I read and replied, momentarily lost in our wonderful exchanges. I have not told you this before but on hard days, those exchanges punctuated the monotonous routine and felt like a knowing look I never knew I needed, which allowed me to emerge for a brief but necessary pause. Honestly, all the processing while still being in the thick of it has made me extremely exhausted. These past weeks, I’ve been thinking about rest and repair quite a lot. I am thinking about the possibilities of recuperating together. At the same time, I am fantasising about a holiday in a place that does not exist, so I can stop existing for a bit. How does one sustain and continue to care for one another so as to be able to take care of oneself? I love to hear how you feel about this.

Anyway, some of the stuff we have talked about resonated and remained with me for a while. I kept them open like tabs on a browser in my mind to revisit whenever I could. One which I am still thinking about is vulnerability in relation to the self (and others). You mentioned thinking beyond the generalised understanding of vulnerability as a form of susceptibility and weakness. I’ve realised that although everyone is vulnerable to the virus, some are more vulnerable than others. In my most basic and immediate understanding, vulnerability is surrendering to hardship, the inability to fight back or resist whatever that has come one’s way.

I believe that to be anything but vulnerable is to be in survival mode. To be vulnerable is to not survive. If I have to be vulnerable, I would keep it a secret. A long cry in the shower always does the trick for me. Sometimes if I am comfortable with someone, I am able to be vulnerable and yet I recover almost immediately. Usually the person knows me well enough to know that they do not have to do or say anything. In fact I'd prefer that they pretended that it did not happen. There was even a period that I was not able to cry when I really had to because I had trained myself not to do it at all. Being a parent, I bring my own relationship with vulnerability to the relationship I have with Inaya. Strangely, I do not wish for her to see me in pain or hurting because it might hurt her too. But by doing so, I am only showing her that I am capable of good emotions and the bad ones do not exist in my reality. and indirectly I am telling her that it should not exist in hers. When I thought about this, I remembered something I read about crying.

“Charles Darwin once declared emotional tears ‘purposeless,’ and nearly 150 years later, emotional crying remains one of the human body’s more confounding mysteries. Though some other species shed tears reflexively as a result of pain or irritation, humans are the only creatures whose tears can be triggered by their feelings.”

In the same article:

"Tears also show others that we’re vulnerable, and vulnerability is critical to human connection. ‘The same neuronal areas of the brain are activated by seeing someone emotionally aroused as being emotionally aroused oneself,’ says Trimble, a professor emeritus at University College London. “There must have been some point in time, evolutionarily, when the tear became something that automatically set off empathy and compassion in another. Actually being able to cry emotionally, and being able to respond to that, is a very important part of being human.”

Did you feel a strange disconnect when the measures were put in place? I felt, at least for me, that this came from me not being able to cry, to break down and to say out loud that “I am not okay.” I was afraid if I did, I might not be able to get up again. So I did not allow myself to let go. Oddly enough, from your teasing on what other ways in which we all can be vulnerable or allow others to be, I felt an immediate shift. I began to feel myself opening up, loosening and slowly unravelling the knots that have kept me contained and functioning all these years. The pandemic has made the fight so much harder and I could feel myself using all I had not to break.

I cannot remember exactly how long after it was the shift happened but I remember crying quite a bit after, sometimes on the train back home, on my long walks or suddenly at the supermarket when everything felt too impossible. It’s funny actually looking back at these moments, the only times I truly felt like myself. When my body finally allowed it, I did let go but I realised that letting go does not mean that I am giving up. By letting go, I caught glimpses of my anxieties, what is making me feel this way or what I might need to pull through. Vulnerability is to allow myself the compassion to feel all these feelings and being able to look at myself and the many ways I can survive, Sam.

Sometimes this new relationship I am slowly forming manifests in my most immediate circles. I find it easier to say "hey today is tough and I need help" because on some days it is harder to do it on my own. I’ve also come up with several coping mechanisms, aside from crying, to help me through the harder days. One, like the images I’ve placed in between this letter to you, are the clustering of moments that I’ve encountered (and documented) in these last months, to jolt me out of the fog. I do wonder about your relationship with your vulnerable self (and also in relation to others) and how much it has changed, if it has at all in these last few months. It would be great to hear your thoughts. <3

Looking forward to hearing from you, my friend.

Keep close and stay open,
ila

25 Nov 2020, 00:35

Ila,

I have started this reply to you numerous times in the week that has elapsed since I have received your letter. I think this enduring struggle to commit myself to any given task, no matter how close I feel to both the work and the person, is the best answer I have towards your question of how I am doing. I have been finding it difficult to see things to completion, to walk the line from beginning to end. What about you, how have you been managing the things that need to be done and the self that refuses to get those things done?

In the space of this week, I have felt the strain of the effort and energy necessary to be present and yet, to be present is crucial in how we receive, respond, attend and care for our loved ones. Perhaps you are right to point out that in order to be present, we need time and space as well to be distant too, which explains why the vision of being away holds such persistent allure. But, I am also learning better where to draw sustenance and rest from and to identify them with gratitude. Even if social interaction extracts much energy, I have also been the beneficiary of the affection, warmth and healing that so many of these conversations have offered. Realising that what nourishes you can also exhaust you is a persistent dynamic of caregiving and care work. I would love to know what your thoughts are on this relationship with all that energises and exhausts us.

What I shared with you about vulnerability takes from Erinn Gilson’s writing, where she conceives vulnerability with greater ambivalence and as a condition of possibility:

“Vulnerability is a condition of potential that makes possible other conditions.Being vulnerable makes it possible for us to suffer, to fall prey to violence andbe harmed, but also to fall in love, to learn, to take pleasure and find comfort in the presence of others, and to experience the simultaneity of these feelings. Vulnerability is not just a condition that limits us but one that can enable us. As potential, vulnerability is a condition of openness, openness to being affectedand affecting in turn.”
(Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression, 310)

On a similar note, I was also obsessively returning to a phrase in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts where she describes feeling “feral with vulnerability” after a declaration of love to her partner. The coupling of “feral” with “vulnerability” opens a way of considering vulnerability like how Gilson envisioned, as a condition of possibility that encapsulates both harm and affection. To be feral can refer to both ferocity and fear, and to be vulnerable, also is to be open to being “affected and affecting in turn.” It emphasises forms of reciprocity that are innate to us.

Even as we move past a limited definition of vulnerability as weakness, we cannot turn away from the reality that being vulnerable also makes us susceptible to harm and danger. This might also explain why you find yourself shrinking away from moments of vulnerability, whether that be the ability to cry freely, to exhibit how you are affected and hurt, and why you found the appeal of cultivating habits of invulnerability that deceptively uphold a projection of mastery, control and competence.

Thinking and feeling through Gilson and Nelson’s writings, I have been trying to reconfigure my relationship with these “bad” emotions and vulnerability. Yes, it is about the difficulty of opening oneself up and risking harm, but having vulnerability as the very condition of our social and bodily relationships and lives also speaks to the possibility of us not just receiving harm but also inflicting harm to another party as well as receiving and giving pleasure and affection. For me, that forms the basis of my thinking about caregiving and our relationships with each other. As with our conversations, we are both moved and we are moving; we acknowledge and recognise the bearing that we have on each other, an act that perhaps also animates a renewed intention to better attend to one another. When I say this, I also know that I am capable of hurting, and I think that is necessary knowledge for us to hold onto even if we have been hurt before. To answer your question, my relationship with my vulnerable self is like you, also a relationship with the people close to me—trying to be better at looking, giving, receiving, attending and reciprocating. It is exactly as you have said, it is a way to keep looking and through this looking, be able to witness and manifest a vision of something compassionate and continuous.

Perhaps we need to find more words for it. It’s not about giving up or surrendering oneself, because that is measured against a certain social expectation of trying to uphold a masterful undoubting position in the world. It is about knowingly giving—giving yourself to another, giving yourself time and space, all while knowing that giving is not inexhaustible.

I love what you shared about tears. It kind of explains why tears are frivolous and necessary and both these qualities are what I appreciate about the act of crying and tearing. Plus, the very word “tear” means to cry but also to rip something up and loosen its structural integrity. I feel like this duality resonates a lot with what you mentioned about the changes since the pandemic, specifically cultivating a better relationship with vulnerability, loosening the self, letting the pieces be pieces. Remember what Mengju mentioned in our artist talk, about moulting and growing, I think it’s a perfect analogy and visual for this process.

You also know that I tear really easily. My eyes get easily irritated, but because of that, I am sometimes unable to associate catharsis with an emotional outpour or outburst of crying. I thought that this disconnect was a way to justify that crying was not my way of unburdening myself, but it actually became an excuse to put off the necessary task of unburdening myself from the weight of… I don’t know. I’m learning from you to not put it off and hide it, and I suppose, we’re both learning how to be more feral with our vulnerability ;)

Now that I have written this letter, I feel again like we just exchanged that knowing look across distance, and with that look also comes a lot, a lot of affection.

xoxo
Sam

5 Dec 2020, 01:33

Dearest Sam,

Thank you for such a wonderfully rich reply. I savoured every little thought you shared and took my time thinking about it. Taking time is definitely a good way to describe the mode of refusal I have been indulging in. When the pandemic hit, I was experiencing rubber time. I could feel time stretching taut and growing limp with no recognisable warning signs, floating between the two worlds of scarcity and abundance. To resist adjusting myself to this fluctuation of being, I have been taking time. Much like you, I have been learning to recognise the different variables of nourishment/exhaustion that I have to perform by taking time.

In physics and materials science, elasticity is the ability of a body to resist a distorting influence and to return to its original size and shape when that influence or force is removed. Solid objects will deform when adequate loads are applied to them; if the material is elastic, the object will return to its initial shape and size after removal. This is in contrast to plasticity, in which the object fails to do so and instead remains in its deformed state.

So in response to your question, I am learning elasticity ≠ plasticity.

Taking care of Inaya every day and keeping to her routines was not easy when the city suddenly went into circuit breaker mode. Our walks grew longer because playgrounds were out of bounds and there was no place for us to sit down to have a break. The places that we traverse daily, such as the parks around the neighbourhood, grew crowded with joggers and cyclists. Every night I’d walk her around a big field to put her to sleep. What usually takes only 30 minutes took us more than an hour, as there was always a flurry of new joggers who were oblivious to our presence and were running loudly on the metal grates or verbally showing their discontent that a mother and child in a pram were in their way.

Right after these long walks, I’d jump straight into work. There was really no time for our family although there was suddenly a lot of time for everyone around us. Bani and I hustled day and night from sheer panic that we might not survive financially. This went on for months and when friends reached out asking if they could offer help, I had trouble articulating what can be done to ease us out of this strain. The only breather we could get was the single day each week that my babysitter came to help out for four to five hours. Caregiving can be isolating and exhausting when labour and time fail to be elastic.

Kinetic energy is energy in an object because of its motion.

For example, a rubber band that is stretched has elastic potential energy, because when released, the rubber band will spring back toward its resting state, transferring the potential energy to kinetic energy in the process.

My mode of refusal is to reverse the expectations I place upon myself and let myself bounce into the clusters of selves that I have to perform: daughter, mother, wife, artist, friend or in some cases a stranger at the park. There is no start or end at the moment. Instead, I let myself have full agency of my potential energy and allow for the circumstances (for example, limitations, accessibility and time) to shape the kinetic energy of that bounce. In other words, I do not let these circumstances be the point of tension. Rather I bounce straight into them to find ways to release the tension in ways in which that can pleasure the exhaustion: I started documenting the routes of our walks and the things we see. On the nights that feel extremely long, I take pleasure in listening to a podcast, having a long conversation with a friend over text or reading. Much like you, I have learnt to be thankful for these pleasures no matter how small.

I have been thinking too, when you mentioned receiving and giving, about pleasures and affection but also harm. I think about reciprocity as a model to maintain ourselves and our relationship with each other. To receive and to give and to receive again and to give again. When harm is received, harm too can be given in return. Not in a vengeful way but to create openings that allow for affection and pleasures to seep through, like making up after a fight or being aware of one’s triggers. I remember you mentioning, in a separate conversation about how boundaries are always changing and the closest of people can harm us the most because these boundaries have not been maintained. I believe harm is necessary for us to understand one another but only through maintenance can we sustain and deepen the many different ways we care for one another.

When I see through an argument or talk through the harm—recognising and acknowledging it and allowing myself to give and receive it—I perform a maintenance on my immediate circles and on myself, allowing relationships to deepen and imagining ways in which we can care for one another. For my closest of friends and family the elastic labour can manifest in many wondrous ways if I allow myself to be open to possibilities of going beyond looking, giving, receiving and attending to recognising, acknowledging and changing the ways in which these relationships can grow in ways that are elastic.

To end off my thoughts on reciprocity, I want to share with you the phrase “terima kasih,” which in English, as you may know, translates as thank you. However the direct translation is actually accept love, with no indication on whether it is I who is accepting your love or you, accepting mine and in that way I feel that it is both and it should be both.

Terima kasih, Sam.

Ila

13 Dec 2020, 12:48

Dear ila,

Reading what you write makes me feel comforted. This need for comfort always felt so frivolous until lately.

I really enjoy how you embody your references, relating the knowledge on tears, elasticity, and kinetic energy to the unfolding of events in your everyday life. This feeling of abstract and gentle comfort from your letter—I was dwelling on it and managed to trace it to the experience of being soothed in my childhood when my mum or aunt offered to dry my hair. They would glide their fingers gently through my hair. This ordinary moment of comfort surfaced from the dredges of my memory, I suppose, because of the loving hand that your letter has extended to me and your reminder to take time.

We know that everything we do takes time but when we place the emphasis on us, and not the activities that need completion, taking time becomes a way of recalling duration and not just deadlines. Duration is defined as “the time during which something continues.” For me, it is also about recognising the ongoing-ness of our work and the work we pour into ourselves and our relationships.

Even as the pandemic has ruptured usual ways of working and opened pockets of time for others, I think that our relationship with time is shaped by various socio-economic factors that determine how we can afford to spend and pass our time. Using the word “afford” is intentional because time and money are painfully intertwined. I was just commiserating with a friend about the process of enduring through emotionally troubled periods and we concluded that yes, time will pass but how easily we can weather this passage of time is shaped by our circumstances. Time does not pass the same way for everyone.

Like you, I think that so much of my weariness comes from having to make time for all the urgencies related to livelihood. We want to make time for what fruitfully edifies us but first we need to give time to collect ourselves from all the fragmentation that sometimes happens oscillating between various responsibilities. For you, between being a daughter, mother, wife, artist and friend, the exhaustion comes too from having to make your time and yourself work three or four times as hard so that it can stretch to accommodate everything that needs attending.

When you brought up elasticity, I was wary because of how we often associate elasticity with stretching and accommodating, to keep expanding and expending energy. But the definition of elasticity that you shared was focused on the ability to return to the original shape after the point of action and tension has passed. I choose to read this as a way of moving away from productivity and competence (as in, which of us are more skilled at multitasking without breaking) but on the necessity of maintenance work which you’ve also brought up. It asserts our need to maintain boundaries. To keep myself intact, I must be clear of my boundaries. That means stubbornly articulating what I can and cannot do, what a task can or cannot expect from me and importantly, what someone can and cannot do to me. How do I name what matters to me? This expression of boundaries keep us elastic. As you’ve put it, it helps us bounce between relationships and activities in a way that manages the exhaustion and leaves room for nourishment. 

For me, elasticity and its state of flux also means loosening what appears fixed and unyielding, such as boundaries. Establishing boundaries always seem like a tricky task because there are assumptions that everyone’s boundaries are similar or that in an intimate relationship, you should innately know what your friend or partner’s boundaries are. To bring up boundaries would seem like a way of casting doubt on the intimacy and closeness between loved ones. From our conversations, I am learning that this assumption needs to be gently challenged because our relationships need maintenance—not because they are lacking but because they grow and change in elastic ways as we continue.

This talk of elasticity as a kind of strategy has also been a reminder not to keep my fists closed and to attend with greater care. When I started writing this letter, my hair was wet from showering and now that I’m wrapping it up, it’s dry and I also feel calmer from exchanging these words with you.

I love how “terima kasih” translates to an offer of reciprocity, to give and accept love. Our letters across this month have been gifts and offerings to each other that I greatly appreciate. Terima kasih, ila.

Just a letter away,
Sam