March 2020
March 2020
online
Respiro del Tempo was a socially engaged art project initiated in Italy at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to the sudden disruption of social life and the widespread experience of isolation, fear and stigma. As people were confined to their homes and suspected as potential carriers of contagion, everyday objects took on an unfamiliar weight, simultaneously intimate and suspect, comforting and threatening. Developed by the social art collective Mirabilia, composed of artists, anthropologists and journalists, the project invited participants in isolation to submit photographs of an object they found themselves unexpectedly connected to, perceived anew under the conditions of confinement. These contributions were assembled into a shared online space that functioned as a community-generated museum or living archive. Rather than preserving artifacts of the past, this digital space documented a collective present: a shared, homebound environment shaped by crisis. In this sense, Respiro del Tempo aligns with practices of participatory archiving and vernacular heritage-making, where cultural memory is produced horizontally through lived experience rather than curated from above.
The title Respiro referred to breath as a fundamental expression of human connection and biological communion: life-giving, relational and shared, and suddenly reframed as dangerous. Through this gesture, the project sought to reflect on the radically altered relationship between bodies, objects and proximity, and to address the tension between material presence and lived experience intensified by the pandemic. Participants were also invited to engage in a series of creative action exercises proposed by the collective such as slow looking, extended observation over time, tactile exploration, object-based storytelling, writing short personal reflections or memories and tracing the object’s daily movements within the domestic space. Through these actions, participants were encouraged to attune to the material presence of objects and to reflect on how meaning emerges through refocused care and use.
By reimagining objects as sites of connection rather than separation, Respiro del Tempo proposed a reconfigured community at a moment when it was disrupted. The project created a space for collective reflection, care and meaning-making by using shared vulnerability and attention to the material world as a means to restore social bonds across physical distance.