Corona Rhapsody - is this real life?

Since the outbreak of the global Corona pandemic, we have often been confronted with the questions of what is actually happening around us and where the border between fantasy and reality lies. In the beginning the situation felt to us like a surreal dream.

We combine different aspects and scenarios happening during Covid-19 in Germany and show the tension between public life, the infrastructural apparatus behind it and the people who move in this space.

Corona Rhapsody is a contribution to the discussion on the question of what changes in our society will be caused by the pandemic. The work questions how the current situation is presented by the media and perceived by the public, to what extent this corresponds to subjective experiences, how the pandemic is possibly being instrumentalized for political purposes, and how we will remember the coronavirus crisis in the future.

This is a collaboration between Rafael Heygster and Helena Manhartsberger. Working as a duo allowed us to illuminate unstaged scenarios with external flashes to visualize our surreal feeling to the events.