Two years after Covid-19 restrictions ended in the UK , how has the pandemic impacted arts, culture and everyday life? On the 5th and 6th September, academics and artists from across the world will gather to discuss this question at a 2-day international conference on the subject of ‘post-pandemic imaginaries’. The conference has been organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL), a new research centre at the University of Liverpool.
‘Post-Pandemic Imaginaries’ is the CCEL’s largest public event since it was founded in 2022 by UoL academics Michelle Henning and Les Roberts. The centre supports and undertakes cutting-edge research on arts, culture and everyday life in Liverpool and beyond. Its work often connects with practitioners outside the academy.
Last year, the CCEL hosted a diverse range of events on toys and play, video games and family photographs and diaspora. More recently, the CCEL supported an artist talk by acclaimed Ukrainian photographer Andrii Dostliev, a collaboration with the Ukrainian Pavilion at Venice and Open Eye Gallery.
We are in a unique moment to reflect on the pandemic. Close enough to remember its emotions and sensations, we nevertheless have some distance to evaluate early bombastic predictions of complete transformation. The second part of the conference’s title – ‘space, culture and memory after lockdown’ asks whether there is a way of living and seeing through a ‘post-pandemic lens’.
Across seven panels and two keynote speeches, the conference will investigate how the pandemic changed our experiences and imaginings of urban space. Overarching themes, including care, creative reimaginings, home and community, create links between a varied set of papers.
There are stories close to home, including the impact of the two pandemics – the virus and anti-Asian racism – on Liverpool’s East and South East Asian creatives and how they responded through flyer campaigns and self-organising. Was/is the pandemic and post-pandemic a universal experience, or was it fractured by locality, migration and race? Emily Beswick, Sufea Mohamad Noor and Ruth Cheung-Judge will reflect as active members of the Liverpool East and South East Asian Network.
For some, the pandemic initiated new individual practices. Joanne Lee started a public diary called ‘Sheffield in virus time’, documenting for three years its impact on everyday life in her city. Out of this journal emerged imaginative alternatives to the status quo. For Pamil Gupta, writing vignettes of her experience in Johannesburg, South Africa, opened new ways of caring and dwelling at home, in the context of strict lockdown measures.
Meanwhile, communities came together to seek comfort, interaction and security. In Leicester, Laura Taggart investigated everyday food practices in cook-alongs and a community kitchen. Collective practices of care emerged among young people in South Korea, who relied on their smartphones to maintain friendships – as documented by Yeran Kim. Shanshan Wu details how Chinese international students in the UK turned to vlogging to express, and archive, their emotions, memories and self-identities.
Mutual aid offered an alternative to state neglect, leading to new political horizons. Viviana Valle Gomez looks at how anarchist sex workers, or “anarchowhores”, imagined a world free from wage labour, through networks of care and resistance.
Finally, the pandemic transformed artistic and museum practices. The closing of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, like so many across the country, inspired Simon Fleury and his colleagues to reimagine what museum conservation means. For David Bate and Howard Walmsley, changes in their day to day provoked new developments in their photographic practices. In response came also new critical perspectives, such as the ‘crip’ approaches to culture outlined by Alex Henry. Whilst our dominant able-bodied culture wants to forget the pandemic, what would happen if we put the experiences of disabled people at the centre?
The papers may cover a breadth of topics and places but underlying them is the key question: was the pandemic a blip, or will its traces remain? The ‘Post-Pandemic Imaginaries’ conference will attempt to grapple with this huge question, which will undoubtedly continue to reverberate in the coming years.
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The conference will take place at the University of Liverpool on the 5th and 6th September. For more information, and the full conference programme, visit the CCEL website: www.ccel.uk/postpandemic-imaginaries. You can follow the discussions on social media with the hashtag #postpandemicimaginaries.