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.

A global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic affects multiple levels simultaneously: global, national, community, interpersonal, and individual levels. While the interplay between different levels of narratives has been emphasised in narrative theoretisations (Bakhtin, 1984; Bruner, 1990; Hunt, 2023), the main focus in the literature has been on the interplay between individual-level narratives and societal-level master narratives, and this process’ importance for persons’ identities and selves (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004; Dunlop et al., 2021; Gergen & Gergen, 1983; Hammack, 2008; McLean & Syed, 2015; Wertsch, 1997). However, master narratives differ from those narratives that arise on different levels to provide meaning during societal ruptures. In this study, through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador, I explore 20 Ecuadorian interview participants’ multilevel narrative engagement with narratives circulating on various levels during the pandemic: the global, national, community, and interpersonal levels. When preparing for future crisis management, it is important with insights from countries that were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Ecuador. In this study, I find that in a context where the authorities’ handling has been criticized for being marked by corruption, insufficient information, inaction, and for placing responsibility for high infection levels on local communities, and where trust in the government was low, multilevel narrative engagement becomes important for citizens’ meaning-making and compliance with measures. Participants engaged with stories such as from international sources like the WHO (global level), communication from the government (national level), stories of consequences of the virus and the implemented measures from local communities (community level), and from family and friends (interpersonal level), to make sense of how they would relate to the government's crisis mitigation measures. Multilevel narrative engagement can thus be a conceptual tool that can shed light on citizens' meaning-making in other periods of global crisis and rupture.

Fiction provides us with something that is imperative in times of political unrest: possibility. Stories, whether on the screen or on the page, provide the blueprints of potential, painting a future where tyrannies are overthrown by revolution or communities overcome centuries of oppression. Fiction can provide a framework for how we ought to be. As such, in this paper, I argue that fictional narratives present new versions of social blueprints, one that can assist in our self-understanding. On my own philosophical theory of understanding identity, I argue that in order to fully understand ourselves, we must be able to grasp the dominant social blueprints that are operating in the social imaginary and thus informing our self-understanding. These blueprints, or schemas that outline how we grasp gender, sexuality, and race identities, among others, are dominant because they are openly assumed to be normative and universal. What fiction can do, in outlining possibility, is to provide a visual or descriptive possibility of a new blueprint. When we see a character designed along some non-dominant blueprint, like women in power or queer acceptance, then we have the possibility of embracing that blueprint as a schema for our own self-understanding. In this paper, I argue that there is a social benefit in centering characters with non-dominant narratives and non-normative story arcs, especially in relation to self-understanding and pursuing new possibilities of who one can be when the limits of what we do understand seem limited and bleak.