Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega 

Urgent calm. Pulling the emergency brake 

Authorship: Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega 

Format: Germinal action 

Photos: Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega 

State of exception. In isolation. No contact with the exterior except through the screens we have surrounded ourselves with. Your emotions, fear, perplexity, affective expression, it is all reduced to fodder for big data. The unnerving sense of being white rats in a planet-sized laboratory in which the limits of consent and the conditions of surrender are being tested. 

Windows, balconies and terraces have suddenly revealed themselves as spaces of hitherto unimagined symbolic intensity. On our balcony, as on so many others, seeds, sprouts, seedlings have become the most resilient metaphor for the strength of life, and of our will to resist getting dragged along by the suicidal inertia of the promised return to a “normalcy” of inequality and precarity, of immediate and frenzied extractivism. 

In the balconies and the windows, we have found a way to look backwards in order to glimpse the future, such that we may — as Benjamin foretold — collectively pull the emergency brake.