Stop, Go
When my family first began warning me to be careful about a new infectious disease, which was then referred to as the “Wuhan virus” before transitioning to “COVID-19,” the possibility of displacement from the physical places I remade and claimed as my home was as distant as the months between WhatsApp calls from my cousins. In March, when my university forced its students to leave, the time suddenly felt much closer, as if COVID-19 was on the line, waiting for me to pick up. Since then, what both the spread of COVID-19 and the constant movement from one city to the next, state to the next, coast to the next, have forced on my reality is one that binds more tightly the relationship between a physical space and (its) time. One that builds deeper meaning into what the two imbue in each other. In quarantine and shelter-in-place, when the space no longer changes, then it is the constant time that I notice. When the time stays still, it is the constant space that I notice. However, in my moving and staying this summer, I noticed the Stop and the Go; the sudden rush to stay still – still – before a move, and then the rush as I am wrapped in transitioning from one space to the next; the rush to settle in and make comfort, but then the inevitable rush to leave and settle again. Stop, Go.
The four photographs, held together to be in conversation with each other, have been moments and places of Stop and/, Go. To me, they capture the meaning and closeness of what time, space, and home have become this summer.
Leanne Loo (she/her) is a student at Tufts University studying Anthropology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and organizing is centered in abolition, decolonial imaginations, critiques of disease and contagion narratives, and Afro-Asian intimacies.