Bewilderment, Hope, and Despair

Abstract

This essay is a collective investigation of affective experience, bewilderment, and imagery during the COVID-19 situation in Copenhagen, Denmark through multivocal writing and filmmaking. By letting go of the promises of normality, both in thinking and creating, the writers explore various personal, academic, and aesthetic states of affect—hope, despair, desire, and frustration, like temporary landscapes or glimpses of a new world. Feeding on boredom and fear of being isolated, left inactive and frustrated, naive, or hopeful, this essay points into a different and shivering set of changes, personal and societal, that we are currently facing, and illustrates how such changes, full of pain or despair, might also open new becomings of desire and hope.

Keywords

• affect
• pandemic
• bewilderment
• despair
• hope
• collective
• artistic research