To further understand the on- and off-screen display of extimacy and the ways in which individuals interconnect their inner and outer worlds through digital devices and in collaboration with others during the COVID19 pandemic, our research will focus on a specific community of individuals particularly affected by the ongoing restrictions; expatriates in Finland. Young foreigners have most parts of their existing social life abroad and are yet to create a new social network in Finland.

On the one hand, expatriates, in the context of travel restrictions, try to maintain contact with their close ones from afar through video interactions. Digital devices, in this case, allow individuals to share their immediate world with distant others. Indeed, video calls are not to be regarded as simple “talking heads” configurations but they rather constitute, in intimate contexts, ways for oneself to share their surroundings, their ongoing activities, their pets and other third parties, etc.

On the other hand, expatriates develop ways of getting to know other expatriates and locals through small gathering during the pandemic. Digital devices are then ways for them to share their distant world with new acquaintances in their immediate presence. They are indeed used both to reach out to each other through social networks for instance and to show personal elements on smartphones in face to face encounters. In either circumstance, displaying extimacy is always a matter of making visible the invisible through digital devices co-enacting hybrid sociabilities.

Our research methodology to study embodied and artifacted interactions draws on an interdisciplinary approach and resorts to visual ethnography as a way to apprehend the research field (collecting visual data); to multimodal interaction analysis observing verbal and non-verbal behavior; and to phenomenology as a transempirism, a way to rethink human interactions and artifacted intercorporeality in the digital era. To gather data from these hybrid sociabilities in times of a pandemic we make use of the Leaf Infrastructure (University of Oulu) to video record both face to face small gatherings between expatriates (following the current safety guidelines) and video calls between some of those expatriates and their remote relatives.