Pandemic narra(c)tions. Collective audiovisual configurations and participatory self-care

Abstract

During the first lockdown to limit the spread of Covid-19, a new medial scenario has taken shape in all its rich complexity. The proliferation of tentacular info and iconodemic events has presented, in fact, the manifestation and the progression of a double media movement: on the one hand, the amateur involvement in multiple narrative processes, increasingly involving participatory audience and prosumers; on the other hand, the amateurization of cinematic rhetoric and languages, which are reconfigured in a logic of everyday narrativization. Accordingly, based on rule-making creativity, grassroots performances have set a dialogue with canonical and institutional authorship in the wake of the audiovisual narrativization of the Self in everyday life. Within this framework, certain narrative acts occurring during the pandemic have the power to intervene transformatively in the everyday life they record and tell through performative and amateur participation. In this perspective, the article intends to explore two fronts: the process and the contextualization of amateur performances, based on creative prosumers’ participation, within a collective yet cinematic project; second, the impact and the role of audiovisuals as reparative media leading to beneficial self-telling practices. For such purpose, through the illustration of emblematic collective projects, the essay questions the potentially transformative and beneficial nature of self-representational and audiovisual performances that characterize pandemic and postpandemic mediascape.