Virulence 2020

Virulence is a response to the COVID 19 pandemic and, particularly, it’s link to climate change. We are paying the price for Capital’s voracious exploitation and extraction of nature. The price is our health, our environment and our lives.

In the first image, the artists are seen grappling with the dilemma of trying to make work under the pandemic lockdown. The devastated landscape in the photograph’s background contain characters constructed to represent a headless CEO cutting down the already dying Tree of Life, then leading back to a history of pandemics: the Spanish Flu, Ebola, the Bubonic Plague, and the decimation of Indigenous peoples through removal and disease.

In the second image, set in the future, the artists observe characters from the Zomm screen in the first image, in a sustainable and safe world. They are repairing and tending to a bountiful tree of life, while burying a deflated corporate suit.