Collective Sonder Vol. I by collective_sonder

C o l l e c t i v e

S o n d e r Vol. I

Collective Sonder is: Aidan Thawley Elaine Yeung Tia Richards Yurou Liao

Published by Collective Sonder Collective Sonder Vol. I, April 2021 © Collective Sonder 2021

This project explores the differences and similarities of our pandemic experiences using superimposition to contrast and compare our cities. The pandemic has inherently transformed the way we imagine and navigate our streets from lockdowns to social distancing. In creating these compositions, we have been able to depict the experiences of our daily lives within the emergency of the pandemic. We have found it fascinating to recognise the altered realities we experience on the same day, and how the pandemic tangibly manifests within each city. The inability to meet due to COVID restrictions left us questioning how to build community and an understanding of each other’s lives through alternative means, despite the physical distance. This project not only captures our exploration of daily life within this new paradigm, but the organic process of how simple acts such as walking down our street may have differed from before. It has also allowed us to examine the everyday as an inspiration for creative expression, while experimenting with the definitions of “artist” and “art”.

Starry Night

By taking these incredibly familiar scenes of each other’s daily life, and transforming and blending them together, we interrogate the hybrid realities we have learned to live in: a life lived both hyper locally and unbounded by geography, one where some are restricted from traveling outside of their local neighbourhood, while also peering into dozens of other cities daily through social media and video calls. In this surreal world, we have taken it upon ourselves to find familiarity within this strange new paradigm some of us had entered, and to discover new ways to feel close to one another as we worked with each other’s spaces. This zine acts as a creative form of storytelling, which has allowed us to raise key questions and converse about our respective realities in the emergency of COVID through the manipulation of surroundings. Key to this are the narratives surrounding distinct and altering urban space, where we are able to visually depict personal circumstances. The superimposition seen throughout the zine combines our four urban spaces to create a tangible imagination of the pandemic. During the artistic process, we realized that several overarching — sometimes overlapping — themes were prevalent in our images. Brief descriptions of these themes appear in the pages of this zine, and we invite the reader to imagine, and draw, the connection(s) between text and image.

Adjoining Rivers

Presence

Gazing Afar

Absence 6

Exploring perceptions of the pandemic from four standpoints is accentuated by this theme. Our contrasting photos highlight distinct narratives which are present in each city, from isolated landscapes in Berlin and London, to busy shopping malls in Zhuhai. The difference between each city is explored through superimposition merging these juxtapositions into one photograph, accentuating individual narratives that each of us have experienced of the pandemic.

We have also created images which exclusively explore ‘absence’ and in turn the innate isolation which COVID-19 has inflicted upon society. There is an intrinsic link between the pandemic and empty space as parts of our worlds have been rendered desolate. In the context of cities such as London and Berlin, photographs of empty urban space emphasise the immense change which has taken place during the pandemic. In contrast, photographs of natural spaces such as rivers, parks and forests highlight a world which has remained unburdened by the impact of the pandemic, instilling a sense of tranquillity which the natural environment has provided for so many.

This theme allows us to explore the global pandemic at a trans-local scale, where individual narratives are used to create a meta-narrative. This highlights the importance of acknowledging locality when describing the effects of COVID-19, as they can be used to create a wider discourse of the pandemic (Robinson, 2016). Furthermore, this theme illustrates the dynamic nature of urban space and governance of the pandemic across cities.

Merging Sunsets

Players in the Park

Tsu

Four

nami

Normality in Blue

God Bless Us

Hybridity Our sense of reality — as well as our interpretation of what fits into this framework (or not) — are largely based on what is familiar to us: our surroundings, routines, cultural traditions and ways of life. What if we no longer had to take these things into consideration? Would it open up a world of alternative possibilities?

In some of these images, we have combined elements unique to our environments to create “new” realities that would not otherwise exist in any of our countries of residence. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen countries implementing different levels of restrictions and limitations and control to curb the spread of the virus. Likewise, individuals have been responding to these measures in different ways.

Convergence

Taken out of context and placed in a new context (of this zine), some of these images, upon initial examination, could appear to be taken as a single shot, in one place. However, when the geographical locations and corresponding socio-political legacies juxtaposed in the images are revealed, one realises the impossibility of these situations beyond the pages of this zine. 13

Views of Home

Different

New Parallels

Realities

It is undeniable that the world is made up of a large number of ordinary cities, and the structure of each individual city is unique. Thus, the conception of the city and internal processes shall take account of the different geographical contexts and histories of the formation of each city (Robinson, 2015). We are living in different urban regions, having different foods, looking at different landscapes, and experiencing different customs and cultures. But we might question whether living in various places means we cannot have the same mood and watch the same sunset. Based on the similarities and differences of the urban environment in Berlin, London and Zhuhai, we carefully contrasted the photos revealing these alternate realities. For example, pandemic measures exist across our cities, even though they are in different forms due to different cultural, political and historical backgrounds (Robinson, 2006).

Thus, we fitted together these photos just like combining the pieces of a puzzle. As a result, we have created photos revealing a stark contrast between “busy” and “empty”. Zhuhai’s photos capture the ‘people mountain people sea’ scene effectively, in marked contrast to London’s and Berlin’s photos with a lack of pedestrians or passengers under the lockdown. This project enabled us to theorise the urban environment in a world of cities by visualising the insights gained in one context in relation to the diversity of urban experiences. It means our theorisation is comparative in nature. Due to the trans-local interaction existing between cities today, the conceptual challenge stems from the need to generate cross-cutting concepts based on a specific context, but at the same time it can illustrate cases beyond these preliminary observations (Robinson, 2016). And this theme overcomes this challenge as the photos represent what is unique to a Chinese city, as well as what is a shared characteristic observed across Western and Chinese cities.

People Mountain People Sea

Out of Bounds: Indoors

Out of Bounds: Outdoors

Humanities

Brown’s Road

As we’ve grown to know each other through this project, the lack of physical grounding in each other’s experiences have been highlighted in our work together. In any other time, we would be meeting in person, spending time together in our various locales, and getting to know not only each other as people, but also our familiar environments. 22

Through the merging of our worlds in these pieces, we’ve been able to explore this lack of embeddedness in each other’s daily lives. As we explored how our worlds fit together in these compositions, we gained this familiarity through different avenues. Although we’ve never gathered in one of our local parks for a walk or met at one of our favorite pubs, we now know each other’s daily spaces through the tactile experience of creating images of these spaces.

Through this intimate process of sharing and blending our worlds, not only do we observe the pandemic’s effect on each other’s spaces but through this work we are actively creating the bonds of familiarity and spatial socialisation that we have lacked over the last year. As we played with each image, we found a sense of camaraderie and closeness that has been elusive for many in these times. The project has ended up not just being the act of artistic creation, but social creation as well. 23

Our photos constitute narratives, though they are not similarly read (Doloughan, 2006). Photographs are aesthetic and moral products (Hirsch, 1981). They construct social reality through visualisation and their meanings are embedded in cultural, social, and political contexts (Becker, 1995). Personal stories, local connections, and relations to artworks appear in visual narratives. Rather than drawing on conventional pictorial traditions that only produce aestheticised views for observers’ gazes, we use photos to tell stories (Crang, 1996). Snowpark

Roof to Roof

Everyday lives are materialised. Our photos are also linked to other real and imagined urban spaces of mobility, representing ways of negotiating urban landscapes (Datta, 2012). These linkages are shown by superimposition and puzzling nature in some images. Montages and juxtaposition of photos highlight the complex relationship between different ways of seeing the urban landscape.

About

Chimera Meeting

Collective Sonder /ˈsɒndə/ [English] Sonder noun “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own” (Koenig, 2013) [German] sonder adjective Extra; special; not belonging to the norm [Chinese] 过客感 adjective Derived from the meaning of “sonder”. Did not originally exist in the Chinese language; a “foreign word” created after the understanding of the literal meaning of “sonder”

Aidan

Aidan works in Walthamstow, East London and sees their current existence in urban space as a deeply cyclical endeavour but finds joy in observing the patterns of hyper-local life.

Elaine

Elaine is fascinated by different forms of life appearing in urban in-between spaces. She lives and works in Berlin.

Tia

Tia is located and works in North London. She acknowledges that the narrative of her urban space is constantly evolving at the hands of the pandemic.

Yurou

Yurou lives and works in Zhuhai. She is interested in different experiences of various cities, and the way that these must be explored within the context of far-reaching political and economic change. Collective Sonder is a group of four artists based in Berlin, London, and Zhuhai working together, exclusively through virtual platforms, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our vision takes inspiration from the multiple interpretations of the word “sonder”: we firmly believe in the equal importance of our members’ perspectives of the pandemic, itself a condition that is everything but normal. In addition to shedding light on these experiences, our work compares and contrasts conceptions of creativity and everyday creative practices across different cities, cultures and geographies — as well as the dialogues that emerge in this process. Through the use of different photographic practices and techniques, our output reflects on our respective, and combined, urban spaces during a global emergency. We are committed to creating an archival visualisation of the pandemic and the bonds established during, because and despite of it, across cultural and geographical boundaries. We hope to spark a dialogue on how — even as the pandemic has brought about greater distances and limitations around the world — it is nonetheless possible to find new forms of closeness and connections through artistic expression. www.instagram.com/collective_sonder www.issuu.com/collective_sonder 27

Index Adjoining Rivers

4-5

Brown’s Road

22-23

Convergence

Four

Gazing Afar

God Bless Us

Merging Sunsets

New Parallels

Normality in Blue

Out of Bounds: Indoors

Out of Bounds: Outdoors

People Mountain People Sea

Players in the Park

Starry Night

Roof to Roof

Snowpark

Tsunami

10-11

Views of Home

14-15

Selection of

Source Photos

References Becker, H. S. (1995). “Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: it’s (almost) all a matter of context”, Visual Studies, 10(1), pp. 5–14. Crang, M. (1996). “Envisioning urban histories: Bristol as palimpsest, postcards, and snapshots”, Environment & Planning A, 28(3), pp. 429–452. Datta, A. (2012). “‘‘Where Is the Global City?’ Visual Narratives of London among East European Migrants”, Urban Studies, 49(8), pp. 1725-1740 Doloughan, F. (2006). “Narratives of travel and the travelling concept of narrative: Genre blending and the art of transformation”. In Hyvärinen, M., Korhonen, A. & Mykkänen, J. (Eds.) The Travelling Concept of Narrative, Helsinki: The Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, pp. 134-144.

Hirsch, J. (1981). Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect. New York: Oxford University Press. Koenig, J. (2013). The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Available at: https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/ post/23536922667/sonder (Accessed: 1 March 2021) Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2015). “Comparative urbanism: new geographies and cultures of theorising the urban”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), pp. 187-199. Robinson, J. (2016). “Thinking cities through elsewhere: Comparative tactics for a more global urban studies”, Progress in Human Geography, 40(1), pp. 3-29.