duration: 23 minutes. Commission for "Days — and counting", a digital programme; Online. 2021
La Peste is a performance lecture juxtaposing narrated verbatim text excerpts from Albert Camus’ novel – chosen for its sparse and haunting prose – with contemporary and historical images of life in times of plague.
Because the text excerpts act as the anchor of the piece, it was important that the source be a work of literature in itself. Like us hyper-materialists in contemporary neoliberalism, the inhabitants of Oran lead busy lives centered around the economy. And like them, we had a hard time accepting that our highly-advanced world could be utterly undone by some little virus. Finally, the absurdism of The Plague most accurately reflects our collective sense of powerlessness in the face of a chaotic universe.
I was interested in how no one (beyond epidemiologists and doomsday preppers) could have anticipated a pandemic of this severity and duration in our lifetime, nor anticipated the bizarreness of some responses to this calamity – including flat out denial by certain leaders, mass loo roll hoarding, and the deliberate infection of others by plague victims; only to realize that humankind has in fact played out all of these scenarios to a T on loop since forever. I wanted this piece to be a sort of zooming out from the overwhelming mayhem of plague life, to show this extraordinary time as a tiny blip in human history. Humans have lived through countless pestilences; COVID-19, too, will eventually run its course – even though it may not feel like it here in Europe where we are currently in a third-wave death grip. Living between Singapore and London, it has also been fascinating to experience the stark difference in how this pandemic continues to unfold on both islands.
La Peste was launched in Days — and counting, an on-going portrait of COVID-19 that captured the surreal and strange times we live in through the lens of art and artists. The programme unfolded in three seasons each taking the form of an immersive digital experience that explores our new reality under the pandemic.
The experience debuted on Friday, 19 February 2021 and ended on 30 April 2021.
Season 1 Curators: Alan Oei, Daniel Chong
Season 1 Web Development: Eugene.tyz
Season 2 Curators: Alan Oei, Kirti Upadhyaya
Season 2 Web Development: Keith Chia