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Recording... So how should I start this? I start by introducing who I am? Yeah. Okay, my name is Althea. I am, I am an artist. I am originally from China and been in the US for four or five years, and has been dealing with very difficult immigration issues since August 2019. I was invited to join this project by Naoko. Naoko is my friend, we used to attend the same residency in Washington, D.C. and after that residency ended, I moved away, from D.C., and moved to New Haven. I started a new residency at Art Space in New Haven.

00:01:08.320 - 00:04:02.220

Um, what have, how has COVID-19 impacted me? As I...It's very hard for me to not mention the rehearsal because I've already said these things all the time. But, okay. How has COVID-19 impacted me? My short answer is it hasn't really impacted me. Because a lot of the issues that other people have newly run into are things like unemployment, things like lack of health care. These are things that I've been dealing with since the beginning of my immigration issue. So I, before COVID-19 hit, I had six to seven months of living through a situation like this. To a certain degree it just feels like my life hasn't really changed. After the entire society has entered the staying at home stage, and COVID-19 has indeed impacted my way of, like, my day to day life in the form of social distancing, in the form of staying at home, in the form of wearing face mask and protection. Going out, following the news every day. But to a more, to a more essential, to the core level, like, my artistic practice, my projects, the way I conduct research and connect with people, speak with gallery, try to network with curators and other artists, that has not really changed. And because my life has already been at a very, my life has been in limbo for a long time. This COVID-19 couldn't really push me to a more than most state. So it's just been, it's just been like this for a long time. So it's interesting to see that a lot of people who are newly expressing how frustrating this is, and I look at them and I feel full of sympathy,

00:04:06.410 - 00:06:51.700

What, who or what has kept me going in this moment of crisis? As I said, it doesn't really feel like a sudden moment of crisis, it feels more like an extension or an extended period, or an extended version of something that I've been experiencing since August 2019. It's been a long time. And I've been going all this time, so I didn't quite feel that I needed to, like, look for something new to sustain me through this crisis, this moment of crisis. There is a long term project, like an art project, that I've been working on. That has not changed. And I guess I can say that the progress that I've made on that project, the connection that I've made with local communities, a promise that I've made to them, are important things that's keeping me going. But yet still, I didn't quite feel that there's a need to change much of how I am, how I have already been functioning, in dealing with my immigration situation. There is, I mean, COVID-19 has indeed impacted the relationship between China and the United States. So some of that political situation are indirectly causing increased pressure to my immigration issue. The larger social atmosphere is that Asian Americans have been trying to organize themselves. TBS just published this new four episode documentary so like, you know, in a way that, it is a time one group of people are taking the hit of anger and negative emotion from the rest of the society in a way that, this group of people have even bonded more than before.

00:06:53.670 - 00:08:56.970

So I guess this is a way of saying what I'm experiencing. And what do I hope, what do I hope we learn from this crisis? I don't know. I don't know. I really, quite a few. I mean, a bit... I guess, like, there's one thing that I think, that does feel new to me is seeing the loss of life in the form of numbers. Like every day, we hear the news and we see the number of people who are infected or who have lost their life due to this pandemic, and some of the people where I guess, more and more people start to experience when these very abstract number actually overlap with the real people that they see or interact with in their real life, physical life, on a day to day basis. There's overlap. Like, this pandemic has brought the sense of death a lot closer to me, and I hope that... I don't know how to continue this line of thought. Am I making, like, am I making any sense here Naoko? Like, you need to give me some reaction, because I mean, like are you going to cut this part out?