un-safe

un-safe by Eliza Krikoni (Athens) & The Krank (Berlin)
Double Instagram live stream performance

Bodies, medical mask, plastic material, smartphones, social media
presented by Museum of Now

April 2020, today.

“Humanity is stricken by COVID-19. Thousands of people have lost their lives and even more exist under perilous conditions, not only due to the unexpected progression of the pandemic but also because of the vertigo of the unstable and fragile economic structure that they balance upon. The majority of governments worldwide have imposed a national curfew. The fear of the fabricated prosperity of the modern world collapsing is bigger than ever before. The medical community advises: #stayhome. Social distancing utterly alters the once before multidimensional communication into a binary one."

Unlock the mind: How can bodies communicate with each other under conditions of a global lockdown?

The project un—safe deals with the struggle of two people to overcome the distance and the introversion of isolation in order to create an interaction. Their physical distance is defined at 2.331 km and finds them anchored in their own solitary cyberspace, experiencing a parallel reality. Through their cyber-secure communication, a communal space and time is created, an open dialogue which stems from their concerns upon issues of social inequality.

Both of them are experiencing a dystopian condition of apprehension and insecurity for the day after, and seek the boundaries between individual and state responsibility. They negotiate the provision of and accessibility to public health, winding up questioning their very own existence, and also the form of their future coexistence. The audience, unwittingly trapped inside two different prisms, comes out of the passive position of the spectator and subsequently becomes witness to their own reactions between two worlds that tend to merge.

Un-safe is part of the Museum of Now digital exhibition "Distant Bodies"

curated by Denis Leo Hegic, Michelle Houston & Jan Fiedler
supported by YAP - yes, and... productions