Olga Gurina

My pandemic story does not sound me as unique. The only thing that seemed interesting was that the covid put everyone in some new non-standard conditions.

And in my case, it was the experience of life without a husband, whom I saw only every two days two hours during the first three months of the pandemic, although usually we are lovebirds that stick out in front of each other’s eyes. In March, almost immediately after the start of quarantine in Ukraine, I fell ill.

I didn’t go anywhere, fearing that I got sick with covid, we phoned a doctor we knew, who said that since the temperature was not high, everything was ok. But the state was very strange, complete exhaustion and apathy, it was scary to cough, I checked myself for shortness of breath. When my husband came, I put on a mask so as not to infect him and was glad when he left. I screwed blue light bulbs into the free sockets, rather as a talisman than as a real disinfectant. And slowly I fell into a vegetative lifestyle, I only had enough strength to watch TV series.

So the first month passed. In April, I began to come to my senses and to understand that quarantine is for a long time. That I will not get to the anniversary of my mother in Russia. That I need to do something to raise my spirit and efficiency. I went to study at MoMA’s online courses, painted on cardboard boxes and came up with new concepts for opencalls. In August I began to study at the School of Engaged Art Chto Delat. The school has a hybrid format, some of the students study offline, the other part joins them online. And this is another story about how I studied using zoom, when most of them studied offline in St. Petersburg, how we were looking for technical solutions to better hear and understand each other. I’ll do a work about it. My video work The Snail’s Testimony, made during my studies, was selected for the international SmolShorts festival, in my environment appeared people with whom I want to work together.

But in general, the feeling is oppressive, it is unclear how to get to parents without harm to health, it is unclear what to do with tanks near Voronezh, it is unclear how to help friends who are taken by the police at rallies, it is unclear how many people will die and how many virus strains will be born in closed countries of the covid era.