Notes from Isolation - A Logbook of Thoughts and ‘momentum’ Conversations in Times of Plagues
By Andrea Pagnes
London: LADA, 2024, 451 pages
ISBN: 978-1-8380229-7-6

AVAILABLE THROUGH UNBOUND and at selected events.
 
 
It is stunning, it is epic, it is powerful and profound, it is a wonderful thing.
–Lois Keidan
 
Andrea’s thought chronicles and dialogues with friends delve into the intricacies and diverse experiences of displacement, cultural questioning, and tradition. They wave from presence to absence, ponder what it means to be alive, move fluidly between performance and introspection, and populate the metaphysical space this book represents, crafting a love letter to those who dwell between corporeal and spiritual conditions.
— Chinasa Vivian Ezugha
 
Performance-making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes — who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage — explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.
 
Very glad to hear about these Notes! That was good!
— Timothy Morton