Given the circumstantialism dictated by the pandemic, the model of confinement imposed on us is inevitably comparable to the condition of living in the panopticon that Jeremy Bentham conceived in 1785 as a model of incarceration. According to Michel Foucault, the panoptic is characterized by a social and spatial architecture within which surveillance and punishment are indistinguishable. This self-surveillance model resembles the potential and exponential visibility of virtual reality, imposed or voluntarily assumed, due to the impossibility of leaving the place where we are.

As we experience the existential architecture of the panoptic, our ability to see the world is inversely proportional to our ability to live outside it. We live confined, in the paradox between the visible and the invisible, where we only travel through virtual visibility or remain physically invisible within our real social space. Incapacitated to be physically in space, we look for a new notion of place. Like in psychogeographic situational maps, we can also create the constellations of our possible journeys through virtual space.

This collage is a compilation of images and artworks from different artists and architects that were being exhibited during the first lockdown (March-June 2020) in several galleries and art spaces in the city of Porto, Portugal. This image reproduction through the panopticon form, intends  to demonstrate what became visible in times of enclosure, by overlapping the geographical location of specific cultural spaces and the artworks images that each one provided virtually. 

Mapping Invisibility was a journey through visible virtual spaces, where we were not permitted to go physically during the quarantine. As observers of this new state, we made the networks, cultural and artistic, visible from the centre of the panoptic, as long as we did not leave it; on the other hand, and as virtual interpreters, we mapped the possibility of seeing, in the impossibility of being.

Research by Patrícia Coelho, Ana Vieira de Castro and Francisco Varela

Exhibition Be my quarantine: mapping times and spaces of isolation, a project promoted by Space Transcribers

Photography by Lais Pereira