29th Sept 2021
Here, in my home city of Melbourne (Naarm), Australia, we have endured over 200 days of quarantine since the start of the pandemic in 2020. During the past year we have been able to successfully suppress Covid virus transmissions and deaths to zero after a 4-month intense lockdown. “Double doughnuts!” we begin to boast. Then new variations make that goal increasingly difficult. Meanwhile we continue to live under a curfew and with limited reasons to leave home inside a restricted zone around our homes. At the time of making these works that zone is 10 km.
“Dictator-Dan” tabloid headlines and graffitti, protests, conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and mask refusers - all indicators of national stress points - break the bubble of my lefty arty social media milieu and the superficially benign surface of my middle-class neighbourhood. Supporting or opposing the strong strategies employed by our state government to limit virus infections has created a culture war between neighbours and other states. I am in the fortunate position of having few other concerns apart from the health and safety of my loved ones, but when the daily news of increasing case numbers, aggressive right-wing protests and lack of vision by our conservative federal government become too much for me, I need an outlet.
I find a phone app, one of many that had sprung up during the pandemic, to indicate a circle of various distances from any location. Then I research compass points and plot the 16 cardinal points that are 10km from my house. In the guise of exercise – one of six authorised reasons to leave home - I travel to the boundary of my restricted travel zone to document the limits of my freedom. On my journey, I listen to a podcast in which scientists and astronauts discuss the isolation of space travel and future quests to establish colonies on inhospitable planets to escape from global environmental disaster. As I travel the short distance to the extremities of my current existence, I have a creeping sense that all assumptions of the future are being tossed in the air, upended. That resistance to uncomfortable change is futile, in a world that will never return to cosy certainties, if there ever were any.
Driving around the 10 km circle limit, I point my camera over the border at every one of the 16 points. The result is a set of images which represent looking forward and outward from physical, political, and psychological boundaries. It seems like the right thing to do.
“You can’t be in love with your old life. We need to see ourselves fundamentally differently. If your whole motivation for staying happy on Mars is the day you get back to Earth, then you are not going to make it.”
Retired Astronaut, Rusty Schweickart