Corona Call 2020
by Sana Sanaa
Artists and works selected by the jury
The following 25 projects – in alphabetical order by artists first name – were selected by the Corona Call panel of judges comprising 7 international curators, editors, publishers and artists. We are all very pleased with the success of the contest: 578 projects from 466 authors, all together 5.785 images showing a broad panorama of the impact of this pandemic, , both in society and in the private sphere. A team of curators is already working on the first exhibition, which will take place in October 2020 at the Fahrbereitschaft Haubrok, one of Berlin’s most exciting art venues. Further exhibitions are already planned in Nairobi, Lagos, Kigali and Cape Town. Each of these exhibitions will be individually designed by the respective team of curators: In addition to the works on the shortlist, the curators have access to all submissions and, depending on their individual focus, they will select further works.
Short List
Attila Gazsó (Hungary)
Lockdown Diary
The covid-19 pandemic took a serious effect on the everyday life of my family. As a father of four the closing of schools and daycares, home education and generally the long closeness was a great challenge, while working in one of the biggest shopping centre of Europe my job and with this, the main income of my family was in danger.
MoreCarlo Bevilacqua (Italy)
A New Italian Renaisance
The coronavirus pandemic has been revolutionising the way we live and work, and some of the social and economic consequences may prove to be profound. In reality, every crisis always conceals an opportunity. From the very beginning, the Italian business world was able to seize this opportunity, not only by continuing to produce, work and ensure that the country could keep on moving during the emergency,
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Christian Sinibaldi
(United Kingdom)
Evering Road People
A microcosm of London life In a time of lockdown where we’ve all been asked to stay at home, I turned the camera on my own street. Evering Road is 1 mile long in the heart of Hackney, London and I’ve lived here for over eight years without really knowing those around me.
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Da Miane aka Nika Pailodze
(Georgia)
Untitled
The quarantine during Coronavirus disease made people stay at homes and created turbulence of emotions and fears as well, caused by Pandemic period. I tried to express how woman takes her role and how her rights to freedom of speech are restricted in family. Moreover, a woman has to do far more domestic chores in Pandemic period and I express that by washing, drying and ironing of the masks.
Dillon Marsh (South Africa)
Fever Dream
Fever Dream is an ongoing photographic series that is part artwork and part therapeutic outlet. I started producing these images towards the end of 2019, a few months before the Coronavirus outbreak started. At first, the driving force behind this project was my growing malaise stemming from my distrust of humanity’s ability to take care of itself and the planet we live on. Lurid colours and dystopian undertones permeate the images in response to these feelings.
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Gloria Oyarzabal
(Spain)
NOTES FOR A (RE)IMAGINED #WALDEN
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau leaves the family home in Concord and settles in the cabin he has built next to the Walden Lagoon to “live life intensely from beginning to end”. Walden, Thoreau said, “is a book written for that majority of men and women who are unhappy with their lives and the times they have had to live through, but who could improve them.
MoreGuillaume Martial (France)
ROOM WITH VIEWS
ROOM WITH VIEWS is a visual search developed as part of the lockdown. She stages a character in his room locked up with himself. Finding himself incarcerated in spite of himself, a man half naked plays with space, time and objects to try to build himself a new world, with derision and poetry. Each photographic sequence, composed of 3 chronological images, tells of an unreal situation lived or manufactured by the character.
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Irmina Walczak
(poland)
Oasis: In our quarantine yard.
It is a series created during 95 days of the confinement of my family in a Spanish countryside, the place we were surprised by the lockdown. It explores the experience of social distancing in a rural area where space is widened but, at the same time, human presence is scarce.
MoreJonathan Liechti (Switzerland)
Encounter on the doormat
On March 17, 2020, the Swiss government declared the “extraordinary situation” and tightened measures against the spread of the new coronavirus. Distance rules were introduced to protect the population and private contacts were to be kept to a minimum. Where we had previously crossed the doorstep as a matter of course, we were left with noticeable uncertainty. A new kind of meeting arose: we laughed, discussed and listened at a distance – we drank from the glass we had brought along and went to the grocery for others. The conversations on the doorstep quickly lasted several hours. This series shows the encounters with the closest contacts as my partner and I experienced them during the two months of the Corona lockdown.
Marc Shoul (South Africa)
Time Between
“The Storm Is Upon Us” President Ramaphosa Covid slipped into South Africa while it was busy giving Italy a beating. Anxiety and fear increased as a national state of disaster was announced in March 2020. Pressed into a morbid game of hide and seek we isolate. Soon after Ramaphosa announced the procedures for a 21-day lockdown, the South African National Defence Force were deployed to enforce the new reality and rules.
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Matteo Garzonio
(Italy)
Rear Window quarantine
“You, unknown neighbor, everyday up to the roof with your children and made me smile, despite the heavy, leaden mood that surrounded us.” In Milan, during this Covid-19 lockdown time, balconies, terraces and roofs have become the only useful places to get our yard time… we took a walk on the roofs transformed into gyms, solariums, libraries.
MoreMiguel Furtado Martins (Portugal)
Fotografia em Tempo de Emergência
A vida vivida de um Lar Residencial Senior em Lisboa. De repente, o mundo ficou de pernas para o ar. Apesar da ameaça, há muito latente, de um vírus conhecido, designado internacionalmente por Corona Vírus, ninguém parecia, ou melhor, ninguém estava preparado para enfrentar uma tal ameaça à escala global,
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Nicola Bertasi
(Italy)
Pandemic Postcards from an early future
We have received mysterious postcards from the future, addressed to the citizens of our virulent times. They are stories of epidemics that affect our present and recent past on this planet. I put together the best clues and tried to rearrange the information. A message? A suggestion? A warning or a joke of the space-time dimension? Who cares. Here they are. There are ten of them, and more might arrive.
Nicolás Carvalho Ochoa (Spain)
THE NEIGHBOR’S HANDS
The coronavirus crisis and the collapse of the Spanish economy turned a network of small organizations and neighborhood entrepreneurs in Barcelona into crutches to help homeless people and families whose economy was already hanging on a rope and suddenly became submerged by job losses and the lack of income.
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Salym Fayad (South Africa)
Epicentre: A pandemic hits the most unequal society
South Africa entered one of the continent’s tightest lockdowns on 27 March. It was an early, preventive reaction. Very soon the paralysed economy bit the poorest sectors of one of the most unequal societies in the world. And in one of the most unequal cities, where the divide along racial and social classes is more evident.
MoreSouleymane Bachir Diaw
(Senegal)
Focal point.
“Focal point” aims to represent the dialogues I went through between myself and the others while being physically isolated. In fact, this (ongoing) period makes me reconsider my relationship with the “Self” and the “Other”. Actually, it makes me wonder where is “I” ? Where is “You” ? Where is “We” ? Where is “They” ? It seems that the border between myself and the others were becoming thinner. It seems that I was becoming the “Other”.
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Ura Iturralde Larrañaga
(Spain)
AN OASIS INSIDE THE PANDEMIC
This work shows the daily life of cloistered nuns in the Basque Country, Spain, during the pandemic. AN OASIS INSIDE THE PANDEMIC They pray for us, for the ones that have lost their lives, for the end of the pandemic. Very little has changed in the daily life of cloistered nuns from Tolosa (Basque Country, Spain) whose days are strictly organised and scheduled.
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Valentin Bianchi (Belgium)
Croque la mort
A few months after China and several weeks after other hard-hit countries such as Italy, Belgium has to deal with this Covid19 pandemic which is devastating all over the world. Nothing seems to stop it, and some professions still have to continue their work. David Weise, 45 years old, is in charge of a small funeral home in the Outremeuse district of Liège.
MoreYusuf Arıca
(Turkey)
In the hospital
I am a general surgeon in a district hospital in Turkey. During the Pandemic just like the whole world , our hospital also had major changes all around. During the Covid-19 crisis in my free time I’ve tried to show doctors, nurses and the whole hospital staffs’ devotion and dedication towards people through my lens.
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The worldwide spread of Covid-19 can be seen as a consequence of the approximately 500-year history of globalisation, which began not least with the circumnavigation of the African continent by European seafarers. Against this backdrop, we focussed our attention on the two continents and invite photographers from Africa and Europe (including all Mediterranean coastal states) to submit their works on the effects of the Corona pandemic.
We asked for images that explore how Covid-19 has influenced and changed our lives, whether in relation to your personal experience or with an investigative topic. There have been no thematic, stylistic or technical restrictions. The only condition was to deal with the corona crisis.
Corona Call is a project by Sana Sanaa – Intercultural Dialogues on Art, in cooperation with European Photography, Oath Magazine, CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography, Akoia & Co, Kigali Center for Photography, The Nlele Institute and Artificial Image.
Sana Sanaa’s goal is to generate an open dialogue about art via exchanges from one part of the world to another. Our intention with this photography open call is to continue this dialogue by hosting twin events; like exhibitions of the results in both Africa and Europe. The resulting shows will be a physical manifestation of our continued efforts at Sana Sanaa to connect both continents through art.
About
Andreas Müller-Pohle
European Photography,
Berlin, Germany
Benjamin Füglister
CAP Prize & Association,
Berlin, Germany
Jack Yakubu Nkinzingabo
Kigali Center for Photography,
Kigali, Rwanda
Nyambura M. Waruingi
Akoia & Company,
Nairobi, Kenya
Romney Müller-Westernhagen
Sana Sanaa Representative
New York City, USA
Stephanie Blomkamp
Oath Magazine,
Cape Town, South Africa
Uche Okpa-Iroha
The Nlele Institute,
Lagos, Nigeria
Jury
Partners
