It´s okay to turn off your camera and cry

This is a project that deals with the phrase IT´S OKAY TO TURN OFF YOUR CAMERA AND CRY as a starting point, as a chant, as a repetitive thought. We have heard the phrase ¨How are you feeling during the pandemic?¨ several times. There is now news about how to cope with our feelings, how to manage our feelings, how to express our feelings, how to feel our feelings, how our feelings have changed, how to identify our feelings, or how to deal with them. 

It seems like feeling has become institutionalized.

The installation is integrated by different pieces such as phrases, clay sculptures, videos, and GIFs that propose a critical reflection of our immediate reality. The focus is on the observation of ourselves, the other, and what is produced in that encounter, carried out in the current situation. We are experiencing an ongoing global crisis, first identified in December 2019 and still going on. What we are experiencing as a community is used as the main common scenario. 

The animated GIFs narrate experiences. The phrases or statements seem or are taken from conversations. The clay works as a visual exercise in constructing our own subjectivities, where learning by repetition, letting go and showing every feeling plays a significant role.

As a response to current and past critical situations and living migration as a constant adaptation catalyst, my art practice is on a current mission to find and create safe places. Seeing art as sense-making, my practice chooses to become a soft place itself, enforcing care, rest, and tenderness as a way to exist and resist. In a world ruled by capitalist normative, this action seeks to expand the role of feelings in our world and expand their role in fields such as academia, knowledge-advocated and cultural institutions from a decolonial point of view.

Benazir Basauri Torres

Text for the catalogue of the exhibition "Unter den Nägeln" at the Thüringer Landtag. Erfurt, Germany. 2022