Floating in quarantine: where colourless green ideas sleep furiously

Abstract

This piece is a collaboration between Venice-based photographer, Katarina Rothfjell, and Turin-based sociologist, Luigi Russi, both of whom experienced the onset of quarantine in Italy, in March 2020, in order to contain the spread of the Covid-19 disease.An abrupt rupture in the conduct of everyday life punctures an atmosphere of safe expectations and reveals unsettling new proximities. First and foremost: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is ubiquitous but also invisible. Alongside it: the prehensile vapours where speech begins, and the erratic soundscapes that keep vibrating bodies together across open windows.By charting these proximities, the piece strives to make visible the ‘continuum’ of bodies—human and nonhuman—as they ‘take place’ simultaneously, and affords a glimpse into how the possibility of agency might be imagined in a posthuman horizon, beyond the comforting human-centeredness of the Anthropocene.