A selection from the Loopy Loonies series and a video of my “Corona Report” on view in the exhibition “The New Normal” at the Haus der Statistik in Berlin:
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Installation view, “The New Normal,” Haus der Statistik, Berlin. October 2020
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Installation view, “The New Normal,” Haus der Statistik, Berlin. October 2020
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Untitled, from the series Loopy Loonies. 35 x 35 cm each, graphite on rag paper. 2017–2020
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Andrea Scrima’s drawing series Loopy Loonies explores the violence imbedded in the comic and cartoon imagery endemic to American visual culture. In the context of the present-day political disaster in the US, Scrima’s formal language—which includes splats, speech bubbles, and animated letters of the alphabet—inquires into the ways in which a culture weaned on entertainment, superheroes, and happy ends loses its ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Visit the Virtual Exhibition THE NEW NORMAL
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Andrea Scrima reads her “Corona Report,” originally published in the Brooklyn- and Berlin-based literary magazine StatORec and subsequently in the new anthology Writing the Virus. Returning from Italy at the end of February 2020, just as the first lockdowns went into place, Andrea Scrima reflects on the beginnings of the pandemic and on the Bergamo/Valencia soccer game in the San Siro Stadium in Milan, the biological bomb that led to the virus’s rapid spread throughout northern Italy and Spain.
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As editor-in-chief of StatORec, Scrima invited writers to contribute to the Corona Issue, published between mid-April and September of 2020, to parse the virus as it hit a society polarized by racism, privilege and politics. As the last essays and stories were published online, the decision was made to compile a book. The result is Writing the Virus, the first anthology to explore the human effects of the pandemic, published November 1, 2020 (9781944853754, 280 pages, Outpost 19 Books, San Francisco, ed. by Andrea Scrima and David Winner).
The 31 Writing the Virus contributors track the virus’s progression from epidemiological threat to international crisis and sketch the evolution of Corona’s rapidly changing meaning over the past half year. The authors of the anthology are featured in a special #stillHERE with StatORec playlist presented by the downtown Manhattan performing arts space HERE Arts Center and featuring a video each week of the authors reading short excerpts from their essays, poems, and short stories over a six-month period of time.
“We wanted to compile a record composed of as many voices as possible, before we began forgetting things.” —from an interview with the editors in the September issue of The Brooklyn Rail.
andrea scrima 