A più di un anno dall’inizio dall’inizio di una delle crisi più complesse dai tempi della seconda guerra mondiale, la nostra risposta alla pandemia è sempre la stessa. In un periodo di tempo molto breve nei primi mesi del 2020, un certo tipo di risposta alla diffusione globale di un nuovo patogeno si è rapidamente imposto come quella che alcuni chiamano la “nuova normalità”.
School students, parents and teachers gather in front of Venezia’s central train station to call for the immediate re-opening of schools, which have recently been once again closed across most of Italy in a misguided response to an alarming rise in newly detected cases of Coronavirus.
Newspapers declare total alert over the rising number of SARS-CoV-2 cases, and also mention that newly impoverished hospitality workers are “knocking on the municipality’s door”. As we enter the third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, authorities are closing schools and debating a total lockdown. In the meantime my flatmate, who left his village in Sicily one week after turning 18 to embark on a successful career as a chef here in Venice, is once again unemployed, and is still waiting for his unemployment money for May and June. While the country remain hypnotized by the evolution of the pandemic, every …
More than ten months into the Coronavirus pandemic, social distancing is still a central element of our response to this natural event. But while last spring this fundamentally unnatural measure was mostly described as a form of “caring” for others in difficult times, the language has somewhat shifted over time, and is increasingly based on guilt and sometimes even on playing on the population’s worst instincts.
A group of women from different working backgrounds offers several proposals for a “phase 2” of the Covid-19 emergency that also addresses social needs, and not only productive ones. We need a politics that goes beyond the management of emergencies, and tries to imagine a possible world. By Tristana Dini, Ilaria Durigon, Barbara Buoso and Sara Gandini.