in touch
THE CULTURE OF
TOUCH INVOLVES
ALL OF CULTURE
Classen, The Book of Touch.
Much of the work made in the past year has inevitably been either explicitly or implicitly addressing the pandemic, a time in which another’s touch, once a source of comfort, a language of love and support, had now become a terrible threat to one’s own biome.
I wondered what the lack of touch had done to our sociality as I watched my grandmother being buried over zoom.
Throughout lockdown, I was living in the past, revisiting the thousands of images I taken in the “before”: remembering parties, being in lifts, sharing bottles, cuddling on the sofas, holding hands. I had tens of thousands of files on my phone, an archive as yet untouched. I edited the found videos together, focusing only on the points of skin to skin contact.