During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?

During the lockdown of spring 2020, graduate students of the course “The Politics of (In)visibility” at the University of Vienna collected images that surfaced during the pandemic and edited these into short montage films. The assignment was to develop a visual argument through film. This assignment followed after a series of reading seminars for which students read theories in the field of visibility studies (Brighenti 2007) and discussed the politics of seeing, showing and erasing in the realms of the state (e.g. Scott 1998), media (e.g. Risam 2018), and everyday life (e.g. Hammer 2016). They selected one of the readings as a starting point for their visual research and montage project. The resulting films can be seen in the digital exhibition “The Politics of (In)visibility”. In this post I showcase four of the films. They mimic the popular form of the short Corona video in brevity, style, and format, but also intervene by exposing some striking patterns of visibility and invisibility in conversations around the pandemic.

Repetition and erasure

In my online lecture of May 2020, when I introduced the research assignment, I included some of the Corona-related images I had stored on my own phone as examples. By that time, I had collected more than 100 videos and memes relating to the pandemic, partly as a result of an ongoing exchange with my colleague Eva Ambos (University of Tübingen) with whom I had been exchanging German, Dutch, Indian, and Sri Lankan images. I categorized them into recurrent themes: objects of the pandemic (e.g. toilet rolls), practices of the pandemic (e.g. “funny” scenes of home offices), and figures of pandemic (e.g. the deaf translator, the scientific expert, Trump, and in India the police officer). I had collected these images mostly because I found them amusing, and (in many cases) surprising. During the class, however, I realized that another affective response to these images was now setting in: boredom. If images of toilet rolls had seemed hilarious at the start of the lockdown in March, by May they had become predictable. Their repetitive nature moreover started to generate its own form of anxiety: what were we missing by looking at toilet rolls?

Mariana Sorgo’s film “Flash” starts with a voice, recorded in an overcrowded refugee camp in Greece. This voice gets drowned in other sounds when iconic images of the virus, the toilet roll, the mouth cap, and “stay home” enter the film. The film aligns with traditions in visual anthropology of engaging with invisible or marginalised perspectives: in this case, situations at the European borders and refugee camps that threaten to be side-lined in the abundant media exposure of the pandemic. However, rather than offering an immersive experience of “being there” (as in, for example, Observational Cinema approaches), it centralises the concern over what is discernable and what gets lost in the repetitive visual representations of the pandemic.

Voice and voicelessness

The invisibility and voicelessness of refugees during the pandemic was taken up as a theme also by Marie Vodičková. For her film “You’re All In This Together” she created a contrast between a visible and an invisible part of society through a re-montage of two speeches: one by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and one by Modou Jobe, an activist of the group Together We Are Bremen. The resulting dialogue is projected over a single video image recorded on a train station in Vienna, people passing an advertisement with shopping bags and bicycles while the wind keeps blowing into the microphone, to suggest the distracted audiences towards which both these speeches are oriented.

Vodičková’s film reflects on an argument made by Kalir and van Schendel (2017): that state practices of looking and looking away exist together, and in tension. Kalir and van Schendel (2017) complement earlier arguments about the watchfull eye of the state with research into contrasting situations where states deliberately refrain from recording, measuring and storing information about certain people and places, for example to avoid the burden of accountability. In her project, Vodičková applied this lens of looking and looking away on the state’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contrasting speeches demonstrate that governments promoted and organised social distancing to protect people against the virus, but people accommodated in a refugee center were unable to practice social distancing in the spring of 2020. “Why is it that the authorities are not taking necessary measures in order to protect these people?”, Modouy Jobe asks in his speech. Such disregard can be interpreted as a failure of the state, but can also be scrutinized as part of a broader pattern of state practices of selective looking and looking away.

Instrumentalism and agency

In a project on the visual representation of health workers in newspapers, Daniela Rodriguez Ulloa found that, while health workers had become hypervisible during the pandemic, they were mainly portrayed as a social category, without space for expressing individuality. Rodriguez’ film “Reclaiming Agency” exposes this in a visual essay that employs sound, voice, colour, and special effects to create a challenging argument. Her voice guides us through two scenes, one showing the dominant pattern of visual representation of hospitals and people working in these hospitals, and one showing the self-made images that are shared on social media by the health workers themselves. In the first scene, health-workers are portrayed as shadowy figures in scrubs and masks, anonymous and emotionless. In the second scene, nurses and doctors reclaim agency in their self-representation in images produced by and for themselves and so, Rodriguez’ argues, “navigate and even change the structures around their (in)visibility.” Her argument resonates with existing research findings into the representation of refugees in news media outlets (Risam 2018), which shows that visibility does not necessarily result in recognition. While health workers gained visibility during the pandemic as a group and as a symbol of a situation, this has not neccessarily resulted in broad recognition of the group members’ perspectives, concerns, or interests.

Reproduction of stereotypes

Verena Wernad’s film “Women working at home during the pandemic” deals with the representation of women during the pandemic. Her initial hypothesis was that the domestic work of women was becoming more visible during the pandemic. Yet her research revealed that the domestic work of women had already been visible beforehand, albeit in highly stereotypical ways. The newspaper articles she collected about the plight of women during the pandemic were accompanied by evidently staged representations of domestic work – images that were (or could have been) produced long before the start of the pandemic. Even critical newspaper articles with feminist voices still printed stereotypical gender images for illustrative purposes. The image subscript may have indicated that the image was meant “ironical” (as in the Tiroler Tageszeitung of 26 April 2020), still, the net result was another reiteration of a worn visual stereotype. Wernad’s film reflects on these findings. In the first scene, framed through dark sun glasses, female voices and images are drowned in disturbance. In the second scene, framed through transparant glasses, a voice reporting about gender faultlines during the pandemic is accompanied by stereotypical images found in newspapers. In the juxtaposition between the two scenes, Wernad highlights the invisibility and inaudibility of “real women” even in media representations that discuss gender inequalities.

When students found stereotypical images, a challenge for their own filmmaking became how they could create images without falling into the same trap of reproducing stereotypes. Arguably, generic categories such as “the media” that appeared in some of the films could have been further dissected. During the opening event of the exhibition at the Volkskundemuseum on June 30, 2020, student Katharina Brunner pondered after seeing the films that: “in the end, our own films also simplify complex realities.”

Montage films as interventions

As projects of both popularization and politicisation (in the sense discussed by Fassin 2013), these montage films are an exercise in public anthropology. By drawing attention to some striking patterns of visibility and invisibility of the pandemic, they sensitise viewers to the social inequalities and power relations in which visual representations are embedded. By creating the films in a provocative form that aligns with the popular form of the short Corona video, the makers become part of a visual landscape while commenting on it at the same time.

Acknowledgement

This article is based on research and films by Daniela Rodriguez Ulloa, Mariana Sorgo, Marie Vodičková, and Verena Wernad. They are Master students in anthropology at the University of Vienna.

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Sanderien Verstappen is assistant professor with tenure track in Visual Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and director of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. She was the lecturer of the course “Politics of (In)visibility”.

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References

Andrea Brighenti (2007). Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology 55 (3), 323-342.

Didier Fassin (2013). Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics. Cultural Anthropology 28 (4), 621-46.

Gili Hammer (2016). “If They’re Going to Stare, at Least I’ll Give Them a Good Reason To”: Blind Women’s Visibility, Invisibility, and Encounters with the Gaze. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41 (2), 409-432.

Barak Kalir and Willem van Schendel (2017). Nonrecording states between legibility and looking away. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 77, 1-7.

Roopika Risam (2018). Now You See Them: Self-representation and the Refugee Selfie. Popular Communication 16 (1), 58-71.

James Scott (1998). Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Cite as: Verstappen, Sanderien. 2021. “Hidden behind toilet rolls: visual landscapes of COVID-19.” FocaalBlog, 15 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/14/sanderien-verstappen-hidden-behind-toilet-rolls-visual-landscapes-of-covid-19/