As the latest outbreak of a global pandemic, the event of COVID-19 did not only reshape the ways in which most of us worked, socialized and structured our everyday, but it also gave rise to a particular creative movement, capturing the health crisis and its effects on our lived experiences in real time. From literature to film, theatre and other performative practices like dance or music, almost no sphere of cultural expression was left untouched by the changes and effects of the pandemic. Creatives – professionals and amateurs alike – stepped into the roles of chroniclers trying to capture the particulars of the crisis, be it individually in diaristic formats or collaboratively in blogs and diverse Decamerone-projects that surfaced.

In my talk, I give insights into the diverse landscape that is the phenomenon of COVID-art and explore its characteristic artistic archival reflexes by comparing Milo Rau’s performance trial Die Wiener Prozesse – Die Verwundete Gesellschaft (2024) and Fourteen Days (2024), a collaborative novel by the US-American Authors Guild. Both pieces are centering the idea of storytelling as a practice that at once accounts for political and societal events and also transforms them through the creative process. This tension, I argue, between collective documentation and artistic abstraction makes COVID-19-art a unique phenomenon, that allows reflections on the mimetic properties of narrative and its ability to organically and aesthetically shape the way we think, remember and experience crisis.