Today Is an Everyday Novel about Albert Camus "The Plague"

Waiting In Quarantine

where is the plague and who has it? 

At the beginning of my journey I have been asked several times “what was I afraid of?” “When am I vulnerable?” “what is my drive to be an artist?”

To all of this. My very personal journey to get to the Netherlands has taken several actions from all sorts of institutions, diplomacy, communication, and exceptions to be able to get a passport and a visa to complete a degree, somewhere to be able to remain alive.

In the middle of the month of March, the world has turned upside down once again for me. Coming from Bolivia, where 2019 already saw panic and terror. South America where the world has already seen the panic of political instability and tangible violence.
Now, the COVID-19 pandemic hits the entire world in 2020.

Humanity has taken a shift on how we are behaving now, we all need to question our vulnerabilities and political, economic and social stands on “stay home”. “be safe” “take care” beyond singular countries, but all realities.

The question of consumption fears and drives to remain alive.

How to invest the daily energy. Just like the characters in Albert Camus novel “the Plague” 1947 where places the novel works so hard for the other that forgets to take care. Forgetting self-love or greed? How does the novel unravel the real “disease” or “virus” that is the main character that conducts the story together? The human good or evil, the real spread of suffering, or perhaps the inaction of the everyday through life and death beyond feeling of making oneself vulnerable for the other or not making oneself vulnerable for the others either.

Today in my experience “surreal” or “novel like” dystopia is reality itself. So, where actions take place? The internet! Not Oran Algeria, a novel a poem on paper, an illumination on a medieval bible manuscript. Yet all of them share the same human struggle of leaping to faith with self-expression.

Does it come down to Narcissism of an “instagramable” locked down peak of control of mediated means of desire of capitalism consumption, or to expose what happens in the hospitals, or the physical pain of sickness?

Oran Algeria, struggles to keep it’s economy. There are no disruptive actions in the novel, although there are actions with in the capacity of how the ordinary, the grief, patterns and goals teaches us the repressed and the vigilance over consumption. Back to the real means to keep sleeping, moving and engaging until “something happens” “when this is over”.