From Resilience to Renaissance: Art Generating New Stories After Human Crisis

Abstract

Pandemics are rarely experienced in anyone’s lifetime, but events of such scope are not uncommon in the larger map of human social history (Quammen, 2012). A health crisis triggered by the outbreak and rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus rippled across the globe from 2020 to 2022, in a paroxysm of disruptions to all normality to which most individuals had become accustomed in their daily living. But there is always something to be learned from such events that stop us in our tracks, catapult us into the unknown, and heave us unceremoniously atop the wreckage of all we have ever known. After a disaster strikes, gathering ourselves for the cleanup and recovery requires perspective. A global pandemic. An environmental catastrophe. A personal failure. How do we gather ourselves and make something from a pile of nothing?