Started in 2020 by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer after having COVID-19 himself, this ongoing exhibition visualizes and memorializes the extraordinary loss caused by COVID-19.
During a time when distance and stillness halted public rituals of mourning, “A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial” continues to provide a virtual and physical space to mourn loved ones lost to the pandemic.
In this participatory artwork, a modified robotic plotter deposits grains of hourglass sand onto a black surface to recreate the images of those lost due to COVID-19. After each portrait is completed, the surface tilts and the same sand is recycled into the next portrait, echoing the collective and ongoing nature of the pandemic.
Lately when my mom sees wedding photos from someone I knew like 10 years ago she’s analyzing every detail and living vicariously through it and I need it to stop. Like, mom, I’m perpetually single, gay, don’t know where my job is going to make me move in a couple months and we’re in a pandemic, so it’s not exactly prime time for me to find someone
Today I shared a video of a pentagon meeting where they talk about how they’re going to kill the “religious fanatics” with a vaccine. The following screenshot is the email that I got, and although I am pissed that my work is gone, I now know for sure that the dictators that run the world do not want Christians alive. When I sent the email screenshot to my other email, it was labeled as “dangerous”, which has never happened before. If after this post this blog is gone also, at least let someone out there remember this as the beginning of the end. Fuck you too, satanists. Let’s see for how long you can laugh at the ignorance of the masses. Misinformation my ass, you just feel threatened. If the video I shared was so stupid you wouldn’t have been that quick. And how is “misinformation” about a bunch of elites dangerous?? No one has died from believing lies, after all, everyone who trusts the news is doing well???
Starting my business Africa Fashion Guide in 2010 began with a heart to see trade in Africa and to be a change-maker in Africa. And fashion for me was the vehicle.
Fashion that is made in Africa.
Consider this.
If you too want to see change in Africa but source Chinese made wax-printand you sew yourself or locally in your home country then nothing is touching lives in Africa. I explain this in my…
“In assessing the health of the nation, the Democrats fetishize ‘the economy’ without specifying who benefits from it. Marcia Fudge, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, recently bragged on Twitter that 'the United States is the only major economy in the world where the economy as a whole is stronger now than before the pandemic’.
"But whose economy?
"Google has provided its highest paid employees, who were already working remotely, with a $1,000 device so they can also perform rapid Covid tests at home. Meanwhile, shift workers must spend hours waiting to be tested for the virus they are much more likely to have been exposed to.
"As the ruling class has worked safely from home, having goods delivered by human shields, their wealth has increased because they are extracting value from the viral underclass, who are paying with their time on lines, their pathogenic work, and, sometimes, their very lives.”
A damning new report shows that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have played a role in restricting access to those very vaccines. The report, “Pfizer’s Power,” published this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, examines Pfizer’s contracts with the United States, United Kingdom, European Commission, Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Peru. They offer a rare glimpse into the power Pfizer has to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a public health crisis.
Moderna accepted $2.5 billion in taxpayer money to develop its Covid-19 vaccine. But as the world faces a dire vaccine shortage, U.S. and overseas officials are having trouble persuading the company to license its technology.
A meeting of the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property council ended Thursday without action on a proposal to suspend patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines. The United Kingdom and some wealthy European Union nations, led by Germany, continue to oppose a patent waiver, which was first proposed over a year ago by India and South Africa and backed by over 100 WTO member nations. Since then, the world has recorded over 3.8 million COVID-19 deaths.
Global vaccination has been highly regressive. The extremely poor are also extremely poorly vaccinated. The huge inequality we currently observe is an inequity that may eventually backfire epidemiologically, socially and economically. The regressive pattern of vaccination enhances the risk of the development of more dangerous variants and by doing that it risks exacerbating the direct and indirect effects of the health emergency on social and economic outcomes either through domestic or cross-border channels.
People stand together while wearing masks in an effort to protect themselves from the Spanish Flu. The 1918 Spanish flu killed up to 50 million people around the world and has been called “the mother of all pandemics”.
“Open up the window, let some air into this room.”
Good classroom ventilation was important in 1916, just as it is now. This open-air school was on Moore St. in Richmond, Va.
Creative fundraising supported the schools. Prominent women of the city served as hostesses in the palm garden of the Jefferson Hotel for a series of “golf teas” where indoor golf contributed to the afternoon’s enjoyment. (Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 2, 1916)
Image courtesy The Valentine via the Social Welfare History Image Portal.
[ID: a series of tweets by @ NoahTzedek that say: “Seeing so many people saying “I did everything right” as they say they’ve had a breakthrough case of covid. It is dangerous to moralize contracting a deadly disease. you cannot personal responsibility your way out of a public health disaster.
I understand the instinct to say “I did everything right” when there’s been a complete lack of national guidance, & we’re being told to manage a global pandemic on a hyper local level. We focus on what is in our control. This is also how children react when they’re being abused because it feels safer to focus on what they can control than leave relationships with those harming them, who have power over them.
HIV/AIDS activists have taught us about the danger of moralizing illness. They showed us the collective power we can have when we recognize that it is governmental neglect that is placing us at risk, & our fates are intertwined.” End of tweet.
The image below is an edited screenshot of The Golden Girls. Rose says, “No. I’m just saying that I’m a good person.” Blanche responds “Covid is not a bad person’s disease, Rose.” (The word “Covid” is edited in.) /End ID]
Honestly, we can learn so much from hiv/aids activists. They spend years perfecting the art of encouraging safe behavior in their community without shaming those who did get hiv and while always prioritizing the demand for real systematic protection and universal access to health care.
[ID: two grainy images from a 1980s video, one with bright colored vertical lines and the words ‘all people with aids are innocent’, one black with the worlds ‘clean needles save lives’, both in all caps]
And sure, this is a different disease and a different situation, but the basics are still the same: either we support the sick or we moralize along a health/sickness binary, either we tear each other apart for imperfections or we fight the system.
I sure as hell didn’t do ‘everything right’ over the last 2 years. I’ve been to meetings with more people than should have really been together. I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with people under a small shelter when a sudden downpour ruined our 6-feet-apart picnic. I’ve hugged my friends. I’m a human being.
I could hide my moments of irresponsibility and get angry at others for their flaws, but that wouldn’t make any of us any safer, it would just put anger and suspicion between us when we could be standing together and focusing on the real problem.
(Sidenote, if you want to learn more about how moralizing ‘health’ does nothing except harm the marginalized, also definitely check out fat activists and chronically ill activists.)
