Curfew

On 20 October 2020, the Slovenian government expressed its distrust of the maturity and good judgement of the Slovenian people by instituting a nationwide curfew. This repressive measure was allegedly adopted to limit the spread of COVID-19, despite the country having successfully tackled the first wave of the pandemic without it. Among some of the most high-risk citizens, the memory of the last curfew is as alive as ever; it was instituted by fascist Italy during its World War II occupation of Slovenia. The citizens of Slovenia have been under a nine-hour house arrest between the hours of 9pm and 6am for 174 days. Relative to the country’s population that amounts to 1,548,470,916 hours of freedom lost in a bid to protect us from ourselves. We are all well aware it is impossible to put a time limit on this virus. However, this does not mean that it does not spread in the workplace, factories, on construction sites, at schools, in preschools, hospitals, nursing homes, stores, at gatherings in private and public spaces. What we do know is that this haze of »health« measures is nothing but a pretence for an authoritarian government to aggressively attack, punish and terrorise the nation. These measures are accompanied by legislative changes that will remain after the current situation has passed and the consequences of which will fall on the Slovenian people.

As a response to Slovenian government’s anti-covid measures, on 31/12/2020 the artist known as »name:« created an intervention into public space titled CURFEW. A 1.5 x 5.8 m digital timer was fixed to the front of Fotopub Project Space. The timer counted down the 15 hours between 6 am and 9 pm during which citizens were allowed to move freely. At 9 pm the clock stopped, displaying 00:00:00 for the duration of the curfew. As a reminder of the government’s repressive actions, the timer counted down until the curfew was lifted.