This video exploration is based on the reflection of ‘individual needs vs collective wellbeing’ and how a limit-situation as the pandemic has been drawing new margins between individual and community - specially amongst the more vulnerable and marginalised population.
Drawing inspiration from John Donne’s famous formulation “No man is an island” this project intents to make visible the incoherence of the individualist ideology that COVID-19 has exposed and the radical shift needed in people’s thinking from an individual-first to a communitarian ethos.
In this brief video performance, stop motion animation and puppetry/object animation come together seamlessly. The storytelling makes use of a toilet paper roll -an ‘essential’ commodity that got attention during the first weeks of lockdown- as a central figure to question individualism and one of the most harmful contagion: the lack of empathy.
As a Chilean artist, it has always been interesting to explore the social and political/micropolitical phenomena provoked by unusual events such as uprisings, military coups, ecological disasters, or disease outbreaks, as is the case in our current situation. Latin America is a territory full of contradictions; in constant social, political and economical turmoil. Historically inequality and human rights violation have been one of the major struggles, reaching at different levels to most of its inhabitants.