Errant Journal, embracing plurality and opacity- , Amsterdam, 2022
While discomfort is often something that sneaks up on us, or something we simply endure, could we instead use it consciously as a strategy, and consequently as an act of resistance? […] Equally unavoidable was the presence of COVID-19 in this issue as it has been in our lives the last two years and has drastically transformed the ways we think and feel about being in close proximity to others. The case, discussed here by architectural collective m7red, of the Argentinian government’s Sanitary Park in Buenos Aires, set up to temporarily house individuals infected with the virus who were not able to remain isolated from their families at home, can be seen as an experiment with important implications. How to stay connected while being isolated? What other forms of closeness can we imagine when our zones of comfort are suddenly shattered? As we adapt to a new reality in which the urgency of the COVID crisis recedes in our memory, we can perhaps rethink some of these relations the pandemic has exposed. Let us not just slip back into our comfortable lives unthinkingly but consider how so much of what has been exposed these last years is structural, but not unchanging.
Irene de Craen
