These past few weeks have been rough. For all of us. Living through a global pandemic is hard, especially because there is nothing else to think about. Anything you do, anywhere you go, just reminds you of what you cannot do or where you cannot go anymore. It is the kind of invasive though you can never fight off.

I did not want to make this project about the pandemic. I wanted to be able to do something as I used to do before. But the reality is, it is inescapable. It is everywhere and every time.

This project about a certain sense of craziness. A sense of losing our mind. When I first started to perform actions towards this book, I was only really trying to free myself from the idea that I had of a book. The idea that a book is just something that contains knowledge, meaning. I wanted to see this object as an object, regardless of what it might contain.

Spraying its pages with sanitizer felt like a playful, ridiculous thing to do. But as I should have known, it wasn’t. This action resonated with a modern reality. With my OWN reality.

With lockdown started some kind of hysteria about cleanliness. An urge to purge everything from any bacteria, fear for one another. Washing hands, washing groceries, washing doorknobs… We developed some kind of terror for crowded places. We isolated ourselves from the world, by obligation and psychosis.

So yeah. Sanitizing this book couldn’t possibly have been an insignificant action. After that first video, I started to wonder what I could do with those damped sanitized pages. I figured I could maybe sew the pages back on the book. But that did not feel right on the moment. I thought, these pages, they needed to dry, somehow. Or even, to be “quarantined” for a few days. Just to be really sure any virus or bacteria had left the paper.

In the video ( Always Sanitize your Books ) I finish up by sticking the wet page on the widow, covering the view of the Castle. Somehow, I found this idea of hiding the outside worth looking into.

If I were to cover the windows with my pages (to dry) I felt that it could be a way to represent isolation, both physical and psychological that we are all experiencing in these trying times. Keeping yourself distant from the world, while living in this hysteric urge to keep everything spotless.

Mental lockdown / Capucine Leclere / Art Practice 2 by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0