A Room of Zoom’s Own was a series of 14 posts I created during the COVID-19 pandemic while under home quarantine for 14 days after returning from London. My father died and there I was home but not quite, alone in my son’s room. So close to the hugs I desperately needed. To mark each day and as a simplistic commentary on the Zoomification of teaching and communication, I would start a meeting of one and then doodle (in blue – after Jarman’s Blue) on the screen, taking a screengrab and then uploading it here with a link that went further. This last one, on day 14, needs a little more explanation. I had been meaning to watch the John Hurt performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with my dad before he dies – I took the DVD there with me. But we didn’t make it. In my previous visit, less than a month before, I had recorded him speaking (he was saying something about how you need 10 years to understand something in your own life), but he became frustrated by his inability to articulate what he wanted to say and asked me to turn the recorder off. While back here, before returning to London, I thought of Krapp again when I recorded an audio presentation for an event I was too sick to attend. So, here on the last night of quarantine, I decided to watch Krapp. Yet something was holding me back, a restlessness that manifested itself in wanting to use this time to keep researching and learning from documenta 14 (Beckett was part of the exhibition in the form of the German diaries from the mid-1930s). When I discovered Roee Rosen’s film The Dust Channel on Vimeo, a film I missed in Kassel (the line was too long), I started watching them at the same time, taking pauses of one to watch the other. I noticed the hunched figures of the policeman and Krappe and decided to draw around them. Then later, I noticed the correlation between the roomba cleaning robots and the spools of Krapp’s tape and did the same. But something was missing. That was when I remembered a passage in Beckett’s diary in which he discusses the sculpture of Ernst Barlach, who was attacked and censored in Hitler’s Germany. Barlach too was present at documenta 14 and his Russische Bettlerin II (Russian beggar woman II) of 1907 seemed to tie the whole image together. Suffering was scaled, from major to minor, from Hitler’s attack on ‘degenerate art’ to Israeli anti-refugee policy, from the beggar to Krapp, from the global pandemic to my dad’s death, from the dust to my dust.
