Grounded: A Pandemic Archive
In 2020, I worked with a team of WashU undergraduate and medical students to create Grounded: A Pandemic Archive. For this digital time capsule, we invited our local communities to submit images of physical objects that “grounded” them during the early days of the pandemic.
Each participant recorded a brief voice note describing the story of their relationship with the object. Examples ranged from a punching bag that provided an outlet for fitness and frustration, to a washable marker that enabled a family to write their names on glasses of water around the house.
These images and audio recordings are now available on an accessible website (groundedarchive.com), serving as a living archive of how people responded to the pandemic with creativity and resilience.
Since then, Grounded has organized community storytelling events and is included in our grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Creativity in the Time of Covid-19: Art as a Tool for Combating Injustice and Inequality.
Screenshot of an entry in the Grounded online archive