What is a women’s centre without walls? This was the provocation I chose in early 2020 for a pre-pandemic project I was to undertake with the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre (QVWC). Little didI know that the relevance of this simple question would increase beyond my imagining as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic spread around the globe and changed the nature of how we live our everyday lives and the nature of how we gather.

Adapting to changing conditions, the project became PRESENT/MEMORY – an archive of reflections by women and non-binary people whose voices are not heard in dominant daily news and social media discourse. I have spoken with many people over the last 18 months, some of whom chose to share their identities and others who preferred to remain anonymous. Through this project, I wanted to ensure that their nuanced, complicated and messy lives are recorded as important narratives of this pandemic.

PRESENT/MEMORY does not aim to identify a single ‘female’ experience, and I do not claim to speak for all women. The stories published here reflect the diverse experiences recounted on video calls, phone calls and in-person interviews conducted between July 2020 and October
2021. They provide insights into how ‘lockdown restrictions’ and ‘staged relaxations’ can affect individual and collective moods. This collection shares intimate moments of daily lives – the good and the bad – during what is hopefully a once in a lifetime experience.

Accompanying the testimonies in PRESENT/ MEMORY is a new series of artworks printed on large scale banners that will adorn the walls of QVWC. These works draw inspiration from the desire for political change amplified by the pandemic and feature the words and faces of the people who contributed to this project. They channel my hope that the ‘cracks in the system that have been brought to the fore’ are now too big to ignore.

Across the spectrum, women have experienced the social, economic and health challenges of the pandemic. At home, women have taken up more care work, including schooling and childcare. For an increasing number of women, the home has become a dangerous place with rising rates of family violence. The pandemic has demonstrated the massive gaps in our society between the privileged and the working class. For many, working at home is not an option, and access to technology and resources can make homeschooling more challenging. In the workplace, women have felt the impact of the pandemic both in job losses and as frontline workers. As health workers, cleaners, teachers, early childcare educators and those in the retail sector, women have continued to place their
own health and safety on the front line for some of the lowest paid jobs in the country. For those
in the casual workforce, job losses and lack of government support has had direct and long- term economic impacts. As women deplete their superannuation at a higher rate than men, only time will tell what the long-term ramifications will be on the widening gender pay gap.

PRESENT/MEMORY brings together these elements to send a letter to the future in the form
of a time capsule. Designed in the shape of a COVID molecule, the time capsule will be buried on QVWC grounds – one week for every COVID- related death in Australia. Like many things in this pandemic, the exact time frame for its retrieval will be informed by the changing impacts of COVID-19. Imagining the future in such unpredictable times may seem like a fraught task. Looking back on the early days of this project, even my predictions for 2021 now seem optimistic and naive. For quite some time, I imagined this pandemic as a blip in time, a quirky story to tell future generations: “Remember that year of plague? How we endured a three month lockdown?” I imagined by the time we buried the capsule, COVID-19 would already be a thing of the past. Now, in late 2021 as the political conversation shifts from ‘COVID zero’ to ‘living with the virus’, it is harder to imagine this pandemic as something we can just shake off and return to ‘normal’ but rather as something that will dramatically shape our lives moving forward.

Creating PRESENT/MEMORY has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It has provided
a lens through which to channel my shifting feelings about the pandemic, be it anxiety, confusion, relief, boredom, frustration or fatigue. Speaking to the many different people throughout this project has been a restorative and reflective process. It has allowed me to reflect on my own experiences, fears, hopes and privileges, pushing me to think beyond my 5km bubble.

After all this time apart, I hope the burial of this time capsule will provide a moment in which we can finally gather together to share an experience in person. I envisage this ritual as a moment of shared catharsis and sombre celebration, an opportunity to take a moment and reflect on our shared experience of this time.

Over the course of this project, I have been continually struck by the generosity, care and empathy demonstrated time and again by the women I spoke to. I am so grateful to everyone who participated in this project and to the staff at QVWC for their continued support.

What this period of time will signify in years to come is uncertain, yet if I have learned anything from the past two years it is that the future is never what you imagine. I hope as a society we are able to build on the notions of empathy and care that we have fostered throughout this pandemic and come out on the other side having created a more equitable and caring society for the future.