Last days at the university studios, I remember myself coughing and finishing a big assemblage piece of work, the cough wasn’t bad and didn’t thought it was the virus I was hearing about.  I stop going to university a week before they closedown, telling my tutors that I’m vulnerable person due to health reasons and didn’t want to take a chance, but remember I was already coughing and a bit scared. 

The piece I was working on at the time, have started in January and funny enough, it was titled “Is The End Of The World And We Know It”.

 Have use in this piece of work, Peruvian pre-Columbian iconography from the Moche culture, characters running away from a natural disaster, using objects like the rocks and flying snakes together with a cross that represents the death of someone on the road, together with the tires as a sign for help in the motorway in case of a breakdown or pinched tire, giving a sense of available help in case of emergencies and  have used layers of cardboard on the hills behind the sand dunes, to give a sense of a moving picture along the motorway.

As a good Peruvian used to natural disasters and military coups, I started buying every week at my weekly shopping extra tinned food and non-perishable goods, feeling a bit silly but thought it's better to predict than to regret and didn’t told anyone cause of embarrassment; it reminded me my childhood and the long queues to buy limited portions per person for meat and sugar back in my country in the 80’s. 

At the time was seeing people buying toilette paper like crazy, I went instead to the hardware store and got some fumes masks and googles for myself, just in case, because the normal ones were all gone in Amazon or other online shops.

Thinking at the same time, all the last months conversations with friends about human condition and the velocity of the climate change and is consequences, like the fires and floods around the world, a theme I’ve been working on for the last 4 years. Was telling my friends that something, I didn’t know what, should happen to stop this velocity of consumerism and eliminating nature together with the animal kingdom, I was seeing it happening faster and faster and in bigger magnitudes at the time, like a non-stop avalanche. Was saying that we need something drastic to change the world order and society and surge new ideologies and disappearing old models like democracy, bureaucracy and everything related to it. We humans must suffer and go through hardship to rebirth and save humanity, cause at the end of the day, the planet will survive, and nature will win, but humanity will disappear.

—Ursula Vargas