The online exhibition Space Is Your Own Expression explores how COVID-19 has influenced the spaces composing our lives, particularly through the eyes of students. The project’s co-curator, Ruth Bianco, speaks to Lara Zammit about the concepts underlying the exercise.

The Instagram exhibition Space Is Your Own Expression “documents the disappearance of privacy in the pandemic state of emergency”. How did this exhibition come about?

The exhibition involved mainly prospective architecture/structures students currently pursuing the mandatory module ‘20th Century Art and Culture’ which I deliver within the Diploma in Design Studies, which is the first-year foundation programme in art and design prior to the BSc degree in Built Environment Studies.

The module examines the understanding and interpretation of ‘space’ through different cultural movements and the eyes of different artists and their perspectives. This cultural mapping of space through history and movements was connected to present-day expression through a study of space in the works of About Order, an exhibition by German artists curated by Verena Voigt held at Spazju Kreattiv and funded by the German-Maltese Circle/Goethe-Institute in autumn 2020. 

The collaboration between me and Verena for this project began here, with a workshop with the students on ‘space’ as one’s unique expression. 

The idea of privacy is certainly a spatial one. An encroachment of privacy is by extension a violation of one’s space and the right to privacy, the parameters of which should presumably be determined by the individual. How does the exhibition address the theme of privacy vis-à-vis the pandemic?

Space is Your Own Expression is an art project (through documentary photography) that sets out to explore our understanding of space under new COVID conditions, highlighting tensions or blurring distinctions between what constitutes the private or public in terms of space.

This project initially triggered provocation in students to seriously reflect upon how this situation could impact the way we design the internal and external spaces of the future: what is the impact of the pandemic on architectural space; should we design in more flexible, adaptable ways? The pandemic has seriously disrupted people’s original spatial arrangements. 

On a personal level, we have had to create makeshift study spaces or bedrooms or rearrange furniture, wardrobes, kitchens, halls, or entrance areas.

There are, therefore, different perspectives to ‘privacy and the pandemic’.  There is the question, for instance, of disclosing your illness to others or the authorities, for the sake of statistics apart from isolating.

But, in the case of our project, our interest was to focus on the reconsideration of spatial design and reflect upon how the pandemic could influence future design as well as the concept of ‘space’ within art and the art space.  We discussed this in a class workshop.  

The pandemic has seriously disrupted people’s original spatial arrangements

The idea of photographing the rearrangement of one’s room/home/family/office/study spaces emerged from this exercise. It is of course immensely interesting to see how these art and design students each chose to interpret this first study of ‘private space under COVID’. 

The captions to the photographs are equally evocative of both the emotional and practical states of our current condition and forms of incarceration (mental or physical). The project involves two parts. The first ‘space-house’ explores personal interior spaces. Students were free to interpret the notion of private space in their own way and express themselves through a short supportive commentary on their photo.

Rebekah Abela Fitzpatrick

These photographs reveal the diversity of these young people’s feelings and also, the tensions of our interpretation of space and its current violations and the confinements imposed upon us and everything we love.

The second ‘space-house’ is “under construction”. Students will document (through documentary photography) public space under COVID-19.  The two parts of the exhibition will form the complete project.

Space has taken centre stage in Malta over the past years, not only in terms of the built environment where we feel as though buildings are constantly encroaching on our spaces (both private and public), but also in light of the COVID-19 pandemic which has confined us into strictly delineated spaces. Why have you described the first year of lockdown in Malta as “requiring people to move closer together”? 

The lockdown, social distancing and restrictions on people’s movement and physical proximity has taken a toll on people emotionally as well as causing a great deal of family disruptions.

In some instances, families have moved in together in order to separate those who have had to go out for daily work from those who are vulnerable. Many couples have spent more time together than they normally would have. Emotionally, people have felt the need to reflect more closely on their relationships with others.

Some of the photos depict this emotion and separation through capturing moments of their elders or grandparents behind closed windows or across corridors. These young students have suffered feelings of loneliness and depression at a time when socialising and sharing is crucial and would have been so exciting in the educational setting of their first year at university.

Our personal spaces have undergone transformation due to COVID restrictions, not only in a physical sense as we try to make them more comfortable in light of our prolonged confinement within them, but also on a more subtle level with respect to our habitation of them.  You refer to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which is a work chiefly concerned with the home and how this and other shelters shape who we are, including our memories and dreams. You also refer to “how little space the pandemic leaves for dreaming”.  Can you elaborate on the space of the home in Bachelard’s sense with respect to how this has been influenced by the pandemic?

Gaston Bachelard draws our attention to the “pictures of the happy room”. They are “defended spaces” that have a “protective value”. Imagination, memory, values protect us. But Bachelard also says that our soul is a house in which we live. When these balanced inner quarters disappear, this has far-reaching consequences on our well-being, our creativity and our vitality. 

There are comments from the students describing that COVID-19 has moved threateningly into the interior of their homes. The “protection value” of the building, therefore, has changed due to the invisible danger.  Under the conditions of COVID-19, “dreaming” is no longer “protected”.  It is important that future architects and designers approach the phenomenon of the protective space in an emotional way to create future living concepts that protect “dreaming”, as Bachelard describes it.  

Exterior spaces also provide extended “protective values” for “dreaming” (in Bachelard’s sense) in our external environment, which we experience in the relationships we create with other fellow beings, and with particular places, objects or memories.

Space Is Your Own Expression can be viewed on instagram.com/space_is_your_own_expression/. The exhibition was curated by Ruth Bianco and Verena Voigt and funded by the German-Maltese Circle/Goethe Institute.