SASAH 2022 Yearbook

What does it mean to exist in a space during a pandemic? How do we form space and place in digital landscapes? Can a community exist in these conditions? These are all topics we considered while planning Ruminations on Safe Spaces.

Over the last two years, our fourth-year SASAH cohort’s notions of personal and shared spaces have transformed. In March 2020, we retreated from lecture halls and libraries into the safety of our childhood bedrooms and student homes. Not even the warmth of overheated laptops could replace the human connection that had been severed by pixels.

This exhibit uses visual art, writing, and mixed media to explore how we perceive space and place in relation to ourselves and each other in the context of a pandemic. Ruminations on Safe Spaces grapples with the idea of finding community in our own safe spaces. Whether that be in bedrooms, on Zoom, in a class full of masked students, or alone in nature, what does it mean to feel safe in a time of such uncertainty?

Reese Berlin Bromstein, Catherine Cassels, Andrew Fullerton, Ahsif Khair Mohammad, Gallus McIntyre, Azadeh Odlin, Harsh Patankar, Maahi Patel, Alex Rozenberg, Jamie Scoler, Avery Vojvodin, Evalyn Watson and Denise Zhu

Your Story, Harsh Patankar, 2022

Your Story is an interactive text-based story embedded right in your phone. Pick your own path and discover more about each character introduced, but don’t forget that every path chosen means several get lost to the winds of fate. Explore your own unique narrative with multiple outcomes based on your own experience. Which path will you take?

Acknowledging the Land

Video edits: Harsh Patankar
Audio edits: Andrew Fullerton
Voice-overs: Andrew Fullerton
& Evalyn Watson

This Could Have Gone Differently

In each year of elementary school, I remember the point at which someone would bravely ask, “But what if I don’t want to?”

It was usually before a math test or during a mandatory dodgeball game that radical thoughts would seep into our defiant bones, daring us to test the limits of our insolence and the disciplinary actions of the Ontario School Board. It was Sarah who found it when enough was enough.

“Have you heard of The Summerhill School?” she whispered to the other rebels hiding from the mile. “A school where the kids get to pick all of their classes. If they don’t want to do science, they don’t have to do science.”

That recess, we huddled together in the computer lab to fact check her claims.

“At Summerhill, play belongs to the child,” read the website. “We do not dress up learning situations so that the play will be ‘productive’, we do not look on and evaluate what they might learn from this or that game. Our children just play — and they can do it pretty well all day if they want to.”

“All day?” said Sarah. “But I might miss English. And art isn’t so bad.”

Everyone booed at Sarah’s betrayal. Down with Big Math, we thought, and vive la revolution.

***

At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself returning in thought to that dreamy computer lab where we first realized that this could have gone differently.

As classrooms rolled up their projectors and students gathered in the streets to find out if keg stands counted as close proximity, the world was beginning to wonder how education factored into this new era which required professors to use the term “unprecedented times” at least once per email.

Students were free from classrooms and scoliosis-inducing backpacks, but suddenly became tethered to the laptops they’d once used for entertainment and exploration. As I logged into my fifth consecutive hour of online class, I thought of the sleep hygiene presentation we’d received in tenth grade.

“Only use your bed for rest,” said the gym teacher tasked with explaining everything from baseball to bacterial vaginosis. “Don’t watch TV, or Youtube —don’t even facetime your Grandma. If you save your bed for sleeping, your body will know when to conk itself out.”

But coach’s words were knocked all the way out of the park by the time the pandemic hit. Beds became lecture halls and virtual study dates. You saved a seat for your cat instead of your film class crush. Church and state hadn’t been this close since Medieval times.

In these new dark ages, the allure of the near-mythical Summerhill School came back to my friends and I as we discussed our reignited desire for rebellion. In precedented times, we had been fine with the status quo, content to sit beside classmates nibbling at rotisserie chickens and loudly guzzling iced coffees while discussing Sartre. Now, seeing three Fight Club posters in one day of Zoom was too much; it would have been preferable to see the devil in your tea leaves, or perhaps to break a mirror while holding a black cat.

So, we read the Summerhill manifesto like a book of prayers, dreaming of playing outside like 12-year-olds, of learning about freedom from the beating wings of the dragonfly, and about patience from that stoic, the toad. Why did we need tests and essays to judge us when the world was burning just beyond our Brad Pitt-covered windows — when sleep was our only oasis, and while daylight burned pleasantly in contrast to our searing plasma screens.

But then a week passed. And a month after that. We’d taken walks and avoided assessments, failed to hand in papers and missed class, screw the consequences. It was worse, we found, to flounder in freedom than it was to sit with Whiskers and to do the readings we’d promised to do back when you could see the bottom halves of people’s faces, and their clothes beyond the silhouette of a passport photo. Just when we thought we craved independence, we realized that what we really craved was a comfort that couldn’t be found in retreating from the monotony of business as usual. Plus, the dragonfly was a tease, and the toad was just as greedy as the rest of us.

While staring into that black laptop looking glass as the virus dissolved friend groups and casual connections alike, we began to feel grateful for weekly meetings with people whose perfume we used to smell, and with teachers who used to stay after class to share candy with us. It turns out that when choice is withdrawn, we may originally seek solace in experimentation. But when everything we’ve come to know is threatened, it is commitment to the familiar that reassures us. Nature offers its condolences, but not all day long.

We missed English, like Sarah. And art — even Fight Club — really isn’t so bad after all.

Sewn from previously used face masks, this quilt features over 11,000 squares mirroring the number of Ontario COVID-19 deaths as we headed into 2022. As people become numbers and data points, their autonomy is stripped along with their understanding of safety. This traditional artform juxtaposes the loss of familiarity. The quilt’s blocking is rushed and unaligned, as these spaces were chaotically cloaked in uncertainty. To ruminate on safe space, we take refuge under the covers of our beds. A place blanketed in comfort and warmth, until the word hospital is placed before it. How many more squares until the quilt is complete?

The Deterioration of Safe Spaces in the Covid-19 Pandemic

This piece is a collection of five different short research excerpts that outline a different manifestation that has come as a result of the deterioration of a safe space in the Covid-19 pandemic. By looking at eating disorders, domestic violence against women, drug related overdoses, unemployment, and homelessness, I hope to broaden people’s understanding of the devastation of Covid as it specifically relates to space and place. I hope that viewing each piece scattered throughout the exhibit will ground the exhibit in a sense of reality and the harms that have been caused.

Unmute, Start Video, Maahi Patel, 2022

This project was born out of a pandemic-born inability to articulate my tactile, physical experiences with the land and river. As a student and employee of Zoom, the constant visibility and expectation to be alert and available for long periods of time cornered my attention into the limited space of a 14-inch computer screen. Coupled with the limitations of social distancing and physical isolation, this led to an introverted tendency to render myself “invisible” on online gatherings as a form of reprieve from the screen, having a debilitating effect on how I expressed myself.

COVID-19 Fantasy Draft

When the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic, we all stepped away from our social lives into the safety of our own space and our own homes. When it was time to re-enter the world, there were new terms and conditions: ten-person social circles. As a result, we had to make decisions to bring people into our circles while cutting others out of our lives. For those unfamiliar with fantasy sports leagues, this was unprecedented. For fantasy sports fanatics, though, this was all too familiar: this was a real-world fantasy draft. Click any of the profiles below to read the full piece.

The Anxious Body is the expression of the place, space, and time in the history of humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic. We live, study, and make memories in the land we occupy. The anxiety of navigating our lives have burdened many during this pandemic. These paper mâché sculptures from the newspapers and magazines with COVID-19 news or experiences symbolise anxiety's impact on our bodies. Face mask and handwashing were the two most repeated words in these articles. It is to show that going back in time is impossible. We must reconcile with the past event by creating the space and bringing parts and pieces of our experiences into alignment with our present.

Then approached the number seven
8:46am as it did everyday
I put on my mask
Shielding my face from the sting of the frigid wind
The driver opened the door
And I stepped inside into the stale warmth of the bus

I removed my gloves
And riffled through my pockets for my fare
Flustered, I checked each pocket
Unsuccessfully
With the semblance of confusion and exasperation
Having exhausted the places for which i could reasonably search
I turned my glance feebly up to the driver
Who with an air of his usual pity
Instructively motioned towards the back of the bus

I sauntered along towards my seat
My footsteps created a dreadful song over the hum of the bus
As I passed by
A scruffy man with a news paper
A pretty woman on a poster
A thick yellow post
All of them moving
None of them going anywhere in particular
Each of them frozen but forward-bound
Fixtures of the bus

I kicked the snow off my dirty sneakers
And took my seat
Staring back at the sea of objects from which I had just surfaced
I
A dirty old man
Without the dignity to button up his coat
Or the care to pull his up his ever-falling sweatpants
Apathetically ambitionless
With a mouth brimming with rotten breath
Lined with furry yellow teeth
A man unmistakably held in submission
Trapped and suffocated
By time
In time

I wallowed there for a moment
Sitting in the back of the bus
Until I heard a noise that yanked me from the pit of my self pity
“Ahhhhhh mommaaaaaaa! Caleb’s using mind control on me”
It was two young boys, perhaps 4 and 6
Brothers

The younger one sat next to his mom
A determined look on his face
Squinting eyes with Pursed lips
With gnarled little fingers stemming from his outstretched arms
Controlling his brother
Who stood frozen stiff, unable to move anything
With the notable exception of his mouth

“I…. need… to break… FREE!” the boy finally managed to exclaim
With the utmost conviction and urgency
And he lunged out of his paralysis
Towards his seated brother
Like a rabid animal freed from its cage

Laughter engulfed the dreary hum of the bus
Like a flash flood in a thirsty desert
As the younger boy sprung from his seat
Forced to flee
Like a muskrat from a hungry hyena
His powers now impotent against his elder sibling

The younger narrowly avoided his capture
As he swung like a monkey around the fortuitous yellow pole
And stood inches from the sad man with the newspaper

The mother yelled out,
Calmly but sternly
“Boys don’t disturb that man”
And she gave the man a subtle nod and smile
But the man was sad
And he was gripped by his sadness
And so he seemed to not even notice the boys
Nor hear the mother
And went about his reading

The boys obediently chased each other away from the man
Not pausing a second
To acknowledge the man or their mother
And they chased towards the smiling lady on the poster
And she smiled down on them
Happy that they interrupted
At least temporarily
The melancholic tune
Which she had grown so tired of

Then
The younger boy tripped on his shoelace
Landing with a thud on the slushy metal floor
The chase seemed as if it had concluded
Fallen and vulnerable he looked back to his pursuitor
It looked like the end for young Caleb
But he sprung up again
With the same vigor and life as before
Not pausing a second
To even wipe the cold dirty water from his scraped knee
Their game and their laughter didn’t halt
Not for a second

When was the last time I had laughed like that?
I wondered
When was the last time I played a game?
When was the last time I myself was so absorbed in something
That I too could not be uninterrupted
Not for a second

I turned my glance from the boys to their mother
Who watched her creatures in their antics
With love and admiration
But with concern and careful attention
Her eyes were fixed on them
Following them like a shadow

Like a painter contemplating her work
She understood that her creatures would transcend her
And she concluded that this was all that mattered
And because this mattered
Her stare could be affirmed

When did I last stare like that?
I wondered
When did I last feel a loving concern?
Had I ever?
I hadn’t even felt that for myself in ages
I hoped to stare like her one day

Crossing Space and Time

Life in Pieces is an interactive exhibition featuring artifacts that achieve body through language in an attempt to sublimate the liminality of the pandemic experience. The perceived cheapening of physical, bodily experiences of space and place tore asunder the ‘story-of-my-life’ from the means to write it. Memories came unstuck in time and space to fill the rift where new memories belong, stepping up to once again write the ‘story-of-my-life’. Life in Pieces asks you: When there was no place to go, how did you find space to grow, what did you ask, and what about yourself do you now know?