Despedida Remota | Remote Goodbye
by Solange Quiroga from São Paolo, Brazil
Since 2015, after my mother’s death, my brother and I started taking care of my father and spending most of the time with him. His health was gradually becoming weaker. So, the arrival of COVID-19 in Brazil caught us at a time of great fragility. Visits decreased and I started to monitor him by constant video calls through the caregivers' cell phone. The small screen of the cell phone became our connection: the way to see him and participate in his day and, also, to continue showing him the world "out there". Then I started making screenshots of our conversations, interacting with this transmission system in a desire to retain those intimate and distressing moments. Affective and technological documentation of the passage of time. The result was precarious images, with very low quality, and with “suspended” authorship: which camera was photographed - which only captured and transmitted or which one recorded? Perhaps both - and neither.
After two weeks in this process, my father died. And then, what was precarious and banal became valuable from an emotional charge: a place of farewell mediated by images.
When recovering the screenshots to build a narrative of this farewell, I felt the need to change several of the scenes on the display (in which I appeared or showed things to my father), putting in them a little of what permeated our relationship.
