Za-Zoom presents us with the enormous capacity of human beings to adapt to circumstances and creatively assume the challenges necessary for self-preservation. It is an exercise in observation of Zazen practitioners and how the remote connections dictate the spaces for communication among the practitioners around the world. This creates new ways of interconnecting and allows access to people that before confinement were inaccessible, such as teachers and practitioners from different countries and cultures.
My intention was to create a visual document that exudes peace and stability amidst the chaos, while months passed and other dimensions of the self started to come out, uncovering more and more layers of the human condition. Meditation practice encompasses obscure, obsessive, compassionate, Joyfull and frightfull states, giving as a result an inner portrait of what was happening with the practitioners around of the world during the global lockdown.
The pandemic has confronted us with our own shadow, bringing us forms of suffering that we believed could be avoided through the distractions still possible before confinement. In these images captured during periods of meditation by videoconference, we observe focused practitioners in a profound contact with their humanity, giving us portraits of very particular existential textures, that reach depthts that are sometimes shocking.
With the practitioners we notice certain corpora expressions, gestures and phenomena that is occurring in this meditative envioroment. This combines with the screen images low resolution, a product of the videoconferencing medium itself which sometimes achieves a rarefied appearance that is not easy to perceive through the naked eye. The intention is to enter this environment, sometimes ethereal and sometimes concrete.
It is especially interesting to observe the practitioners surroundings: the decoration, the light, the order or disorder, the symbols of each culture and country. This allows us to go beyond a mere portrait, at times it immerses us in the inner and outer vital space, allowing us to intuit who that person is, who is sitting there with hers or his eyes half open, expressing their determination to overcome adversity.
Practicing meditation during the pandemic has shown us time and time again that problems originating from one person and place are relevant to the entire global village, and that the interdependence is a lot closer that what most of us imagined. the pandemic, as such, shows that if someone eats "bat soup" in China, the whole world gets sick. Through this photo and written essay, we discover that it is not necessary to move a finger, but to just sit consciously breathing in front of a screen, to discover that the possibilities are endless, and that they are beyond conditions of time and space.
NOTE: This is a work in progress, the book is a first dummie.