This vlog documents and reflects on a small leeway event emerging from preparations to the Metamorffosis-Festival. This arts festival was part of the AHRC funded research project “Re-Inventing the Live-Event” (Bangor University) which looks at how the pandemic triggers paradigmatic changes for the idea of bodily co-presence at live-events.


Together with members of the art group Crone Cast, researcher Sarah Pogoda explored how new hygiene routines during Covid-19 changed perception of private and public space as well as how we perceive intimacy. Taking inspiration from the Happening Celtic+ by German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys (1971), Crone Cast and Sarah celebrated a semi-public hand washing ritual. The experiment thus used a composition in which bodies share space and time for immediate bodily contact (washing each others’ hands), constituting an unmediated experience of intimacy. Both bodily co-presence and hand washing have become highly contested and regulated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our artistic experiment was seeking to trigger thoughts through experience rather than discourse, exposing our bodies to a conflicted situation for pursuing the different and ambiguous feelings elicited.

The vlog brings together audio-visual footage from the experiment with thoughts from all participants recorded a few weeks after the event had taken place, translating the ambivalent results into an audio-visual form that is equally disconcerting.

Crone Cast is a collective of artists identifying as women, based in north Wales, arising from Wanda Zyborska’s twelve years of research into reinventing becoming the withered. Wanda Zyborska, collaborating with Lisa Hudson, Lindsey Colbourne, Rhona Bowey, Steph Shipley, Emily Meilleur and others, explores aging, power, identity, eccentricity and merging with the more-than-human. They are currently developing a series of episodes, to be created, performed and filmed in different situations, with various collaborators and participants, also addressing the challenges of lock-down-not-lockdown (e.g. exchanging letters and ideas, exquisite corps).

Crone Cast have been collaborating with Sarah for her research project “Re-Inventing the Live-Event”.