‘View from the window’: On time, politics and domestics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic

Abstract

The present article aims to contribute to theorisations of the politics of time through a detailed engagement with techno-aesthetic strategies of temporal synchronisation and heterogeneisation of everyday rhythms during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. The exploration focuses on practices of mediatisation of domestic spaces, in particular by examining photographs posted on the Bulgarian-language ‘View from the Window’ Facebook group. The group was founded during the first coronavirus lockdown in April 2020 and its members used it to share images taken from their private homes onto exterior spaces. Theoretically, I build on Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalytical project, from which I derive an understanding of the polyrhythmic and multi-scalar character of the everyday, while engaging writings from visual cultures, performance studies, architecture and media theory. The article looks closely at two formal aesthetic strategies that established themselves for posting on the group: The visual strategy of framing and the use of time stamps in image captions. On the one hand, I show how these media practices are engaged in synchronising views with each other; I argue that they contribute to the creation of an equivalence between views while obfuscating their underlying socio-material conditions, which tend to remain outside of the photographic frame. On the other hand, I also demonstrate that these practices can be equally generative of asynchronicity and dissonance between views, bringing to the fore a spatio-temporal heterogeneity and the articulation of stark socio-political differences. The article thus contributes an analysis of the interplay between time, politics and domestics through the conceptual prism of an engagement with aesthetic practices of mediation.