A new exhibit of words, images, and audio collected from around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic now on display at Homer Babbidge Library offers a rare glimpse at how people captured history even as it was being made.
Picturing the Pandemic, created by the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) and Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge, opened at UConn Storrs on Thursday, Mar. 6.
Anthropologists Sarah Willen (UConn) and Katherine Mason (Brown University) started the PJP five years ago to collect people’s reflections on how the pandemic was affecting their lives as it happened.
“We cared about giving people a space to reflect and we cared about documenting, chronicling, and preserving people’s real-time record of their experiences during a time that none of us understood,” said Willen, a professor of anthropology at UConn and co-director the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.
From May 2020 to May 2022, the PJP collected weekly journal entries that allowed people to chronicle the countless ways the pandemic and its attendant disruptions manifested in their lives. In its first wave, the project collected nearly 27,000 entries from 1,800 people around the world.
The goal was to create an archive that would exist into the future so people could better understand how the pandemic was experienced by people living through it.
“We wanted to make an archive that would last and that would be useful to other people in the future, and we made a promise that people would be able to keep everything that they contributed,” said Willen.
The exhibit at Babbidge Library consists of panels featuring photographs and excerpts from journal submissions, highlighting a key component of the project: the variety of ways participants were able to express themselves and document their lives.
“We wanted ‘journaling’ to be defined as broadly as possible. People could write, they could upload audio journal entries, or they could upload photographs,” said Willen.
At the opening ceremony, Willen and other members of the UConn community who supported the development of the project spoke about its growth since the start of the pandemic.
Willen thanked the University and other sponsors for supporting the project, including the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the Humanities Institute, and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP).
“Documents, diaries, letters, drawings and memoirs created by those who participated in or witnessed events of the past tell us something that even the best written article or book may not convey,” said Anne Langley, Dean of UConn Library.
“Its global dimension is really critical; The multiple languages which were used, the fact that you could audio journal or video journal,” said Kathryn Libal, professor of social work and human rights and director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. “It opens up a new way for us to think about collective archiving in the present for future commemoration and scholarly works.”
The exhibition was curated by Willen, Mason, and Alexis Boylan, professor of art and art history at UConn, along with PJP postdoctoral fellow Heather Wurtz and a large team of students and curation partners.
“The images will not let us forget. They remind us of feelings that we had that we maybe put away, of ideas of things and people that we wanted to be but maybe did not work out in that moment, but that we still remember and hold on to,” said Boylan.
With the exhibit located in the middle of a heavily visited area at UConn, many students, faculty, staff, and visitors will have a chance to reflect on their lives in the five years since the pandemic.
Globally, as well as in the United States, people are repressing a lot about the impact the pandemic had, and continues to have, on our lives, said Willen. By offering visitors a chance to look back on this time, the exhibition invites people to consider how their own lives, and the broader world, have changed.
Before coming to Storrs, the exhibition made earlier stops in Hartford, Providence, Heidelberg (Germany), Mexico City and Toronto. For this new iteration, the curators added a new center panel that recognizes the importance of science and of having an infrastructure for knowledge building and social interaction.
“If we pull apart the components of that infrastructure, a lot of things fall apart,” said Willen. “Our capacity to do science falls apart. Our capacity to prepare people for their careers falls apart. Our capacity to provide public spaces in which we can come together and interact with each other – like libraries and museums – falls apart.”
“We’re hoping that this will be a chance for people to see the structures we’ve built in our society to support, connect with, and nurture each other, and to help each other understand who we are in the world, will only exist if we protect them,” said Willen.
Willen especially urges student visitors to the exhibit to think deeply about how their majors, fields, and research can help us collectively confront the problems that society is facing.
“Let’s not lose sight of those values, of how we can put our tools to work to grapple with real-life problems using data and our capacities for analysis and reflection,” said Willen.
The Pandemic Journaling Project and the Picturing the Pandemic exhibition were only possible because UConn believed in them, said Willen.
“We brought our skills to the table, and our students brought theirs, and many different institutes and departments at the university said, yes, this is worthwhile, and they gave us the resources to start collecting people’s narratives and experiences,” said Willen. “Bringing the exhibit to Babbidge Library is our thank you note to UConn.”
Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project will be on display in the entryway to the Homer Babbidge Library from March 5 to March 20.
