Reflecting on grounded: A lens on Covid through Screendance

Like much of the UK, arts communities in the South East were largely paralysed during the lockdown in spring 2020 through the temporary closure of venues in Brighton, the Towner Eastbourne, the De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill, Hastings Contemporary and Hastings Museum, and numerous smaller arts, music and theatre venues along the coast. In May 2020 Claudia Kappenberg collaborated with Fiontán Moran to curate an online season of moving image works that would respond to the issues raised by the pandemic and bring together films of predominantly regional artists. Reflecting on both the condition of confinement as well as the unavoidable immersion of oneself in one’s locality, the season was entitled grounded and funded the University of Brighton's Covid-19 Research Urgency Fund. The season proposed a way of thinking about movement as a political act, using an expanded notion of Screendance both as a practice and as a lens with which to revisit other moving image work. The season considered the variety of ways artists use movement in video and film to explore the relationship of the body to society, of confinement to imagination, and health to politics. In this article the two curators reflect on the curatorial process.