Self As Field

moomal shekhawat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. Individual micro-curated expositions are linked together for www.covidglossary.net in order to generate non-linear readings of the pandemic.

The impossibility / fear of the outside limited ‘field-work’ for academic endeavours. At School Of Environment & Architecture, the idea of ‘self as the field’ was strategized as a response.

SELF AS FIELD

In this case, one’s body, house and neighbourhood became the field - and one’s mind became a repository of memories and experiences from where many notes / observations could be put together.

While this limited and scaled down the field in some ways; it also expanded the idea of the field inside oneself. When forty such fields came together and shared notes in a virtual classroom, the city was reconstructed with these insides.

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