#quarantinediaries was an Instagram takeover and physical exhibition at Fort Dunree.
When his father died in 2008 and he lived away from his home country, Roberto Uribe Castro became aware of the extent of time he spent away from home and the difficulty of keeping track of the passing days. This inspired him to document the passage of time through an object that both he and his mother could keep until they were reunited. They agreed to keep their used bars of soap to share at their next meeting. Then Roberto found himself back in Colombia. Like everyone else, he did not count on the pandemic that would leave him trapped for several months at his mother’s house, unable to return to Berlin. He started to reflect on his memories of the house, prompting his mother to show him
the soap she had been saving.
Roberto began posting photos of the old soaps that his mother had stored and the ones he was using during the lockdown, on his Instagram account, marking the passage of time when quarantine made it difficult to differentiate one day from the next. The series of soap photos did not go unnoticed. People started sending him photos of their soap from different parts of the world. Since then his Instagram account has developed into a worldwide, collective and collaborative quarantine diary.
Although more than a year had passed since the beginning of the pandemic, the reflections which Quarantine Diaries invited were still relevant. The project raised awareness of the overlap between the personal and the collective, the intimate and the public, the hygienic and the infectious, the material and the digital and was an invitation to consider everyday life in the midst of a pandemic and reflect on the past year and its implications for our future.
Roberto Uribe-Castro studied architecture and spatial design. He has worked as a field researcher for urban studies and as a studio manager for Doris Salcedo and Mona Hatoum in site-specific installations. He currently lives and works in Berlin. To complement the exhibition Artlink commissioned an essay by Adrianna Valderrama Lopez, PHD researcher at Ulster University (published on artlinkonline.ie) and collaborated with Claudia Zea-Schmidt to publish an article in the online magazine B26, written by Sandra Ellegiers. This was also produced as a beautifully designed limited edition book.
- May 01, 2021
