BBC World Service South Asia

Resolves

Factual: Life Stories

People reflect on how they will do things differently after living with a deadly virus.

In a series of special programmes recorded as the world gradually ‘unlocks’ during the Covid 19 crisis, we hear from people of all kinds, experiencing life on different continents, in different countries, in rural and urban societies, reflect on aspects of their lives and determine ways in which they want to do something differently. They offer up small and large initiatives; acts that give expression and focus to the change they are undertaking. These echo the Resolves that each of us will also make in recognition of our own preoccupations given the charge of life and the proximity to death, seemingly closer, in the presence of the disease.

We hear Resolves that will bring about a greater awareness of the natural world or the decision to provide mobile healthcare to giving school pupils new educational structures. We also hear the frustration of young Zimbabwean Anele Matshiselaa  who sees the terrible deterioration of health and the natural environment but it has nothing to do with Covid 19 – this is the long term drought that has bought the country to its knees and is the cause of people crying that they would rather die of the virus rather than desperate days of contamination and dehydration without water. He determines an important change in his work in wildlife research and management.

Resolvers include Primatologist Frans de Waal (US), Olympic Gold Medallist Sally Gunnell in the UK, Head Teacher Caroline Hodges (UK), International curator Juliana Engberg (NZ) and Environmental Journalist Gayathri Vaidyanathan (India).

Resolves: Resolves: Juliana Engberg

Juliana Engberg

11/07/2020 GMT

BBC World Service - Resolves, Resolves, Juliana Engberg

A curator and festival director resolves to help artists thrive

How curator and festival director Juliana Engberg resolves to help artists thrive.

International curator and festival director Juliana Engberg resolves to “continue to enable, craft, produce and exhibit work by artists so that we can all go on discovering who we are and what we care about”.
 
From her partial lockdown in Auckland, away from home in Australia, she is shocked and challenged by the predicament of festivals, museums and theatres, but determined to find ways for these places to continue, to operate and thrive.
 
“I realise why I continue to work with art, in all its forms - musical, movement, literary, visual - because it’s a means by which we step out of the commonplace into a suspended moment of encounter, so we can contemplate and release our emotions and curiosity. Art might be surprising, confusing, strange, delightful, inspire love or disgust; it helps us move through our lives in all their dark, light and unstable passages. During these dark lockdown times, it’s art that makes me completely forget I am just a lump of chemical and biological processes that could catch or infect another with Covid-19.”

Image: Juliana Engberg (Credit: Kay Campbell)

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