On Curating
Issue 50
Edited by Hadas Kedar
https://www.on-curating.org/issue-50-reader/editorial-1080.html
Extremely Unagitated—A Closer Look
at the Artistic Practice of Lara Almarcegui
The current situation is uncanny, extreme, and improba- ble. In the popular public consciousness, Covid-19 is a highly improbable event, perhaps comparable to Hurri- cane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005. Had a for- tune teller told us a year ago that a pandemic would strike the entire world in the near future, we would have shaken our heads and exhaled a disappointed sigh. Clearly, such a course of events would have seemed improbable—a mere storyline, nothing of the sort could possibly actually take place. After all, we are not charac- ters from the movie Outbreak. The doomsday block- buster, directed by Wolfgang Petersen in 1995, was based on the nonfiction book The Hot Zone (1994) by Richard Preston on viral fevers such as Ebola. The sto- ryline of Outbreak pivots around the uncontrollable and furious spread of an Ebola-like virus and its contain- ment in the USA in the late 1960s. However, both Kat- rina as well as the Covid-19 pandemic are very much real events regardless of how a wider public perceives them as exceptional or even implausible. I explicitly speak of a wider public because scientists and some politicians had very well taken into account the possi- bility of such events, which had indeed been hinted at or even predicted by previously published research. After the outbreaks of SARS and Ebola, there have been many signs and warnings that these types of pandemics would not remain singular events.