This video experiment was made by putting together some photos and materials that I've gathered during the first few weeks of isolation during COVID-19 pandemic. My daughters stopped going to school, and like every other parent anywhere else, we looked for alternative forms of education, work, and entertainment at home. The girls have an overwhelming energy that never stops, never wears down, and an anxious appetite for activities, going through puzzles and any other challenge in minutes, devouring everything.

I wanted to show this domestic space, in the middle of this disruption of our everyday life. The external space has become something foreign and hostile, so all we have in our internal reality, a space of safety and protection set between very specific limits, anything outside deconstructed, broken in pieces.

 
I'm working on some daily embroideries with fragmented music and lines of thread that make up an image from the front page of a national newspaper, in order to make some kind of record of local and international news and headlines these days. They will be like a memory, a tattoo or scar, a daily mark, one more stripe on the tiger. The passing of time sketched and embroidered on a piece of cloth, like a second skin. The outer skin is shown to the exterior, a cultural skin that is our dress.

Damián Ortega 
April/May 2020