In these pandemic times, one thing I’ve been thinking about is the fact that with the closure of all cultural spaces, it is more difficult to have the possibility to express ideas or concepts or communicate, except on digital platforms.
During the Berlin lockdown, I used to walk my dog every day in front of old abandoned vending machines and an idea came to me: why not imagine a low-cost street vending machine for vaccines, a kind of ‘postcard from the future’, as if the pandemic had (maybe) ended and the abandoned post-apocalyptic vending machines remained as a memory of a distant era?
So, one day I took the measurements and printed and pasted the three versions of the vaccine. My intention was nothing more than to make a simple and anonymous intervention to make people in my neighbourhood smile and think.
I would never have imagined that on Saturday morning (20 February, ed.) I would find my intervention as the image of the first news item when I opened Der Spiegel, one of the most authoritative and read newspapers in Germany, on an article about vaccines and the diatribes about their different effectiveness. The caption read ‘Vaccine machine in Berlin: a topic that has become a real religious dispute’. Then I searched the web and realised that it had gone viral, appearing in the image gallery of the Berliner Morgenpost and in other blogs and newspapers.
Apart from the fact that the work remains anonymous, the connection between the vaccine to go and its potential virality was amusing, and I think that, especially at this difficult time, it is interesting to let ourselves be called by the reduced reality that we perceive, especially outside our homes, intervening spontaneously on it to wring a smile, create small provocations, let ourselves be guided by the objects that surround us, and above all use our imagination.
We can imagine anything, and once we have imagined it there is a greater chance than before that it will somehow manifest itself in reality and expand the narrow boundaries of our existence”