The Self is not Enough - Self-isolation due to COVID-19

For the event, deepening the CCA’s virtual and digital storytelling efforts, CCA Director Giovanna Borasi together with Lev Bratishenko, CCA Curator, Public curated a 75-minute program considering how lockdowns have forced a new perspective on familiar interactions.   In private rooms far beyond Montréal, we’ve continued to reflect on just how, and how long, we’ve been alone. Now, as people around the world begin to re-emerge from isolation (or to re-enter it, for those who now face a second wave) there is a rare pulse of shared awareness and concern. Let’s turn towards this tension and explore it, looking with curiosity and care at the interactions between people, their immediate surroundings, and the city—how they fit into and need one another.  

The program:   We will preview our upcoming documentary film on the growing numbers of people who live by themselves, starting from a case study in Japan. It is the CCA’s second film on key urban changes that follows our recent film on homelessness, What It Takes to Make a Home, which screened at the United Nations headquarters earlier this year and continues to circulate at film festivals worldwide.   Searching for ways to reshape our individualism toward a shared future, we posed questions to primary sources from our global network: from the CCA c/o curators Kayoko Ota in Tokyo, Japan and Martin Huberman in Buenos Aires, Argentina; to Doreen Adengo in Kampala, Uganda, who collaborates with the CCA on the Centring Africa - Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture project; and architectural historian, museum director and curator Guido Beltramini in Vicenza, Italy.   Then we spoke with sociologist Eric Klinenberg in New York City, who is in favour of social solidarity rather than social distancing; architect Sam Chermayeff in Berlin, whose projects investigate sharing and sociability at scales from a table to an apartment building; and long-time CCA collaborator and architect Greg Lynn in Los Angeles and Nicholas Negroponte, about potential transformations to come, and possible roles for technology. We’ve always found it important to find new perspectives to look from, and recently launched the teen program to engage with these clear minds, full of ideas, but whose voices are rarely heard and whose expertise is not well understood. The project explores what individualism and space mean for them. The event includes their first public statements.
 
Text: CCA

 The 75-minute event was organized by CCA director Giovanna Borasi and curator Lev Bratishenko. The resulting films can be viewed at the following external link:

> CCA: The Self is not Enough

oder more detailed on youtube:

> CCAchannel: The Self is not Enough