In March 2020, when the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic came into full focus and people around the world found themselves suddenly and abruptly in “lockdown”, I decided to create a Google Group community with a focus on walking and optionally sharing our evolving efforts to make sense of our experiences in real time.
The group, called Walking in the time of Covid-19, had about 275 members at its peak — including people who live within a few blocks of my home, and people as far away from me as South Africa, Australia, South Korea. We had members old enough to be among the most vulnerable to complications from Covid, alongside young people experiencing new independence at college who had to return home abruptly or lockdown in dorms.
Each week at first, and then less frequently over the course of a full year, I released walking-based prompts meant to stimulate all of us in finding new ways of looking at and connecting with extremely familiar physical territory and extremely unfamiliar psychological territory at the same time.
I was trying to get myself outside and moving around to fight off a sensation of claustrophobia, and to build a physical connection with the elements to help fill the void of not being able to share space with other people. But interpretations of the prompts also often took us into deeper reflection on world events or human vulnerability than expected.
Composite images by Heather Kapplow. Photos and texts from:
[Image 1] Photos and texts Florinda Camilleri (Malta), Alyson Davies (Canada), Bradley Eros (USA), Lisa Hirmer (Canada), Rajat Nayyar (Canada), Ja’Hari Ortega (USA), Anindita Basu Sempere (Switzerland).
[Image 2] Antoinette Burchill (UK), Bradley Eros (USA), Josh Glenn (USA), Kim Jansson (Sweden), Alisa Oleva (UK).
An excerpt from this project was included in the MIT List Visual Arts Center series “This Way” in 2021. It can be found at the following link: https://listart.mit.edu/way-heather-kapplow