COVID-19 and “objects/infrastructures in motion”
I wanted to share two stories that link this week’s discussion on voices about COVID-19 and more general topics of objects and infrastructure in the class.
The first one is the construction of a hospital building in Wuhan, a project that suggests a kind of magic-related promise of infrastructure. A time-lapse footage in the following link displays how the Huoshenshan hospital, an emergency specialty field hospital for the COVID-19, was built within only ten days at the beginning of 2020. The etymology of the name of the hospital suggests the linkage between this public-health-centred infrastructure and the power of magic. The name “Huoshen” (“God of Fire”) was named after an important personage in Chinese mythology. The word “Huo” (“Fire”) is also related to the concept of fire in the wuxing theory, in which the metal element (Jin) governs the lung. As fire overcomes (ke) metal, the name conveys the hope that the hospital will overcome the COVID-19 infection that harms the lung.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-51348297
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51245156
The second story is this Unprecedented Covid Exhibition that happened at Oxford in 2020. It shows collective work created in 2020 in response to the pandemic. Although the exhibition has been closed for long, this website includes a walk through among the objects displayed in the exhibition and gives us a sense of how people’s early understandings of the pandemic shaped art and objects.
https://www.ovada.org.uk/unprecedented-covid-exhibition/
Contributed by YuanZhang on 07/03/2022
