It has been said that a period of crisis can also be an opening, that upheaval presents an unexpected opportunity – a portal of sorts through which we can at least see, if not bring into being a radically different world. This fertile space of possibility, what is often referred to as the ‘otherwise’, is inherent in our COVID present, where everyday more and more people gather in communal awareness of the untenability of what passed for ‘normal’ in the years before the pandemic. But how do we continue to develop this consciousness? How do we stop the fury from escaping? From being misdirected, petering out? How do we sustain ourselves and our communities long enough to keep fighting? To retain as in Gramsci’s famous formulation ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.’

These questions are sketched out, examined and brought to life in the work of interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose 31 year practice, ranging from her early days as a filmmaker in California in the late 1980s, where the landscape of American film had been transformed by the political and aesthetic experimentation of the L.A Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean and African American filmmakers, to her present short moving image works titled COVID MANIFESTO for CIRCA 2020 made in collaboration with The Showroom. Smith’s COVID MANIFESTO will grace the giant screens of Piccadilly Circus all through November, producing as she says in our interview a ‘short circuit in the day of libidinal capitalist advertising’, an ‘interruption’ capable of pulling us out of the calm daze of acceptance, a prodding reminder to direct our attention towards the otherwise.

Smith’s interest in short circuiting complacency, the established modes of thought and feeling which nullify us to the world’s ongoing oppressive violence, enjoins with her engagement in the theories and practise of change, how the world is made and remade through collaborative, repetitive social acts. These new videos then foreground the process of making, they are as interested in the techniques (drawing, writing) through which declarative and descriptive statements are made as they are in the content or ideologies they elucidate. They are also emblematic of the change in working conditions brought about by the lockdown in mid March, a time when she believed she ‘wouldn’t be doing much of anything’ as filmmaking is a ‘very social activity’, a social art where in the past she fondly remembers being ‘barnacled to her cinematographer.’