Living through the compounded catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic confronts us with the confusing inexperience of inhabiting capitalist polycrises whose global, national and local scales are, at one and the same time, insensibly abstract and painfully corporeal.
Such enforced encounters with racially differentiated vulnerability, morbidity and mortality provide the structure for ZONE 2 which aims at the animation of domestic gestures, prophylactic rituals and itinerant routines in North East London where human and other than human inhabitants attempt to adapt themselves to locally specific conditions of national lockdown under the Tory regime of officially disavowed herd immunity.
In its attunement to dread, disorientation, drift, instruction and anger, ZONE 2 aims at summoning the comportment, character and character of moods and feelings that emerge in response to everyday fomite exposure.
As a microcosm of a quarantine life world, ZONE 2 can be understood as a study of reverie in which companionate walkers under conditions of constrained companionship seek refuge in the nature reserves of the Walthamstow Wetlands, Hackney Marshes and Abney Park Cemetery, the first arboretum in Europe to be combined with a fully nondenominational garden cemetery.
45.18 mins. 4K, Colour, Sound
