José Alberto Gomes

2020 CHIMAERA

José Alberto Gomes, Miguel C. Tavares

The word ‘chimaera’ came to signify not just a hybrid animal but anything that seemed to be impossible or a figment of our imagination. In the first months of 2020 more than 3.9 billion people, or half of the world's population, were asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments to contain the spread of the covid-19 virus. This ‘chimaera’ of speech, narratives, faces, expressions and realities is the result of the illusion of contacting a common interlocutor, apparently real and original, that lives permanently in a common interface, a distant and artificial reality.