It’s been five years since the start of the Covid pandemic: on 17 March 2020, the first lockdown came into force in Brussels, where I was living at the time. Covid has lost its terror since then and we’ve got used to getting sick with it from time to time, just like we catch a cold every now and then. I have to work really hard to remember what it was like at the beginning of the pandemic: the fear fuelled by news of the dead and sick, fake news and conspiracy theories, uncertainty and helplessness. Worrying about friends, relatives, parents and grandparents. Being isolated, locked up, thrown back on yourself. It all seems long ago and far away. But it is not over, the pandemic has long-term consequences, even if we would rather not dwell on them. Not only are hundreds of thousands of people suffering from Long Covid; the social climate has also changed and the social fabric has become more fragile. In the course of the pandemic, the polarisation of positions has intensified, the crisis of trust in the state, in democracy and in science has deepened. The world we are facing today is also a consequence of the pandemic.
As with the other major crises or, more accurately, disasters of our time, younger generations are particularly affected by this. Which leads me to my work presented here: as mentioned, I experienced the beginning of the Covid pandemic in Brussels. Public life came to a standstill due to the curfews; you were only allowed outside to get groceries or go for a walk. During one of my extended walks, I came to a somewhat secluded spot on the canal (the shipping canal that runs through Brussels). There were hundreds of small metal cylinders glittering between the cobblestones. I didn’t know what this meant, but was fascinated to collect some of the silver objects. I later found out that they were capsules containing nitrous oxide, which is actually used in cream dispensers but is also consumed as a drug. Consumption rose sharply during the pandemic because the gas was legal, cheap and easy to obtain. It was especially popular among young people for precisely these reasons.
These capsules are a manifestation of a time that has been very difficult, if not terrible, for these young people in particular. The pandemic has had a lasting impact on educational pathways and has had and continues to have a serious impact on mental health and social development. In a phase of life in which everything is pushing outwards, in which one is trying things out, in which one is seeking one’s own identity in social interaction, in which one is beginning a self-designed, self-reliant life, the pandemic breaks in and brings everything to a standstill. No fun, no risk, no experiences.
What remains is a small escape, secretly, with nitrous oxide, ice-cold and under high pressure in capsules that look like small lungs. A drug that you inhale while the world holds its breath. I kept the capsules I found in the studio all those years – I knew I wanted to do something with them, I just didn’t know what. Shortly before the fifth anniversary of the start of the Covid pandemic, I finally transformed the capsules: I etched short sentences into them and put two of them together to make a necklace. One of these phrases is always the same: ‘je respire’ (I breathe). The other phrase varies and reads, for example, ‘je chante’ (I sing) or ‘je pleure’ (I cry). They function as a reminder of a situation in which, on the one hand, the individual life, quite banal as a body that has to breathe, was at stake. And which, on the other hand, was mentally, emotionally and socially challenging. At the same time, the sentences refer to the present and the future: I (still) breathe, I keep going on in resistance to the ambivalences of a world that sometimes makes me sing and sometimes makes me cry.
