I felt sick that morning. A heaviness in my body and symptoms of a cold… but what if it’s Covid? Because, indeed, the pandemic has brought us this fear, any trivial symptom could turn into a tragedy. We had been living for a year already with these stories of people going to hospital to never come back… from a simple cold apparently, but which now bears this terrifying name, COVID-19. And I did some tests, which I had from my daughter, from kindergarten (we tested her almost daily), and they came back positive. All three of us were positive, Lidia and us. And that Thursday morning of February seemed to me such a bad day.
The panic began, the search for solutions, the reporting to the Public Health Directorate, the whole ordeal. I was searching for information on “doctor Google”, as we all do, but, in the meantime, headlines containing the word WAR kept flashing before my eyes. I was too concerned about Covid to read them, but then I got a phone call from back home in Moldova… from my parents. The war had begun and it was near them. The bangs of the bombs from Ukraine could be heard across the border.
Suddenly, the two lines on the Covid test were galaxies, not just hours apart. My little tragedy that morning had become so trivial because, in the meantime, an almost palpable nightmare had taken its place, a 21st century war we never expected. A spectre of death that was just around the corner and whose gasp I heard over the phone whenever I called home to check on my parents.
Last Day of Peace, First Night of War is an interactive digital installation, part of the Museum of Abandonment, a digital wall of images showing the last days of peace collected from mobile phones.
