Lining up the Dead: Aleksandra Krasutskaya

The journal “.coda” has asked six artists from around the world  to depict the Covid-19 experience in the country where they live.

Aleksandra Krasutskaya, the fourth artist featured, reflects on the disturbing weekend of March 13-15, 2020, when the Trump administration bungled the mass return of Americans from Europe. Major airports were swamped by long lines of returning travelers, with visibly ill people cheek by jowl up against other, for hours at a time. No one will ever know how many returnees were infected with SARS-COV-2 as they waited in close quarters to be processed through Customs and Immigration, before being released into the general population, likely to spread the infection exponentially

Krasutskaya depicts an airport, perhaps New York’s JFK, on that fateful weekend. In the foreground,. under a sign pointing to "Baggage Claim. Welcome to the USA" ≠ a dozen or so people of multiple ethnicities are packed together like luggage in a cargo hold.  Some are packed in horizontally. Their flattened angular forms call to mind the jagged violence of Picasso’s Guernica.

From about half of their mouths a yellow-orange miasma extrudes. This is manifestly the viral load spreading like wildfire. But the empty ellipses can also be read as empty speech bubbles, a tangible representation for how little voice the public actually has at this moment of crisis, amidst endless official denial, distortion, distraction and delusion.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the image is in the upper left quadrant.  Two rows of passengers, drawn in black descend, perhaps down escalators. Clouds of yellow-orange rise from some of them as well.  (Through some sort of .gif they actually appear to move downwards in a slow procession.)  These may be more than mere passengers disembarking. They may be premonitions of what is to come, as the virus spreads unchecked: they are dark souls descending, not just to Baggage Claim, but into Hades itself.  Welcome home.