Songnan Guo 郭淞楠

It shows a part of the installation including the Lockdown Forecasting System, photos, and diaries.

Songnan Guo (b.2000, CN) holds a BA in Product Design with an emphasis on Ecology Crisis Design from CAFA(Central Academy of Fine Arts). She is a spatial visual artist and an experience designer as well as a member of the Eco-Vision Project. She focuses on the spatial narrative and specializes in communicating with audiences positively through installation, moving images, and new technologies.

Her works have won the S+T+ARTS Prize 2023 – Nomination, the Gold Award of Asian New Generation Design Exhibition, the Best Commercial Award of LVMH P&C Creative Competition, the Best New Talent Award of Honor Talents Honor Global Design Awards. Her teamwork project was included in the book Graduate360 100 in 2022.

This project started as an exploration and reflection on the absurdity that persists in my life based on my own experience in the lockdown.

I try to use the understanding of the absurdity in Camus' existentialism as a basis for examining the life of the epidemic. In Camus' existentialist theoretical view, humans are rational and the world is irrational. When humans try to use their rationality to understand the irrational world, man is often unable to fully explain and understand the laws of the world's operation, and in such contradiction, absurdity arises. In the COVID-19 Pandemic, humans are in pursuit of rationality and order, but viruses are disorderly. Humans have tried to use their rationality to establish rules to combat the spread of the virus, but by far none of the rules have worked perfectly to achieve their expected effect and contain the virus completely.

Just as we must imagine that Sisyphus is happy, everyone needs to imagine that the sacrifices they make are the right ones, and that is where the absurdity lies.

As my research progressed, I realized that there was a unity between the absurdity of the pandemic and the absurdity in life. All the events in the epidemic that I found absurd were triggered by the contradiction between the known and the unknown, between the rational and the irrational. It emphasizes the innate human fear of the unknown and loss of control.

The audience is invited to enter the installation space and follow the audio left behind by the absent character to discover the reshaped way of life in the future Lockdown context. The audience can follow the narrative logic of the audio and look around at all the objects in the installation, from the diaries and photographs she has written and taken in the past to the lockdown monitoring and forecasting system that has emerged, and listen to her own internal struggles and reflections.

In Collaboration with:

Maite Jauregui

Maite Jauregui played the role of an absent character in the room for this project as a voice actress.

Xin Li

Xin and I co-created the text for this project.

Medium:

Installation: Video, audio, print, Integrated materials

Real-time monitoring of lockdowns occurring within a certain range and forecasting of possible lockdowns within the next seven days based on viruses, extreme weather, nuclear accidents, war, etc., along with possible response strategies.

Monitoring - Lockdown ongoing

Forecasting - Lockdown caused by virus

Forecasting - Lockdown caused by extreme weather, nuclear accident, and war

WIP

Thanks to all those who helped me during the process of making this project (especially Maite and Xin). The content shown above does not include the final presentation, for further details please visit my personal website (www.songnanguo.com).

Songnan Guo 郭淞楠

In Collaboration with:

Medium:

WIP

Social

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Royal College of Art