Post-Covid Blues

Abstract:

Post-Covid blues is a reflection on the sound of coughing. Unfolding in the structure of blues music, it isan interplay of “call & response” expressed both in lyrical composition and in the musical dialogue between instruments. This project takes the form of a dialogical essay between the artist and curator, where every element, from sound to visual interventions, serves as a field for reinterpreting the role of sound in the post-COVID experience.

At the core of this dialogue lies the paradoxical paradigm shift surrounding coughing: an everyday sound that suddenly became a charged social signal, disrupting public spaces and evoking memories of the pandemic. This sharpens our sensitivity to the Other, transforming a bodily reflex into a marker of vulnerability, alienation, and control. A cough symbolizes the fragility of another’s body while simultaneously exposing our own, thus highlighting the biopolitical tensions between individuals and the social order. How long will it take for the echoes of the pandemic to fade? For these auditory triggers to lose their grip on collective consciousness?

As music theorist Michel Chion notes ¹ , listening is not enough — we must also name sounds in order to “humanize” noise and ease anxiety. Rooted in sporadic associations, nonlinear reflections, and the ideas of philosophers and cultural theorists, this text examines how the sound of coughing continues to resonate within culture, contemporary art, and everyday life. The dialogue traverses reflections on the act of listening as a social process, methods of alleviating anxiety associated with coughing, and imaginative methods for overcoming alienation. Unstructured and occasionally chaotic, the dialogue evokes the soundscapes of a melancholic blues melody while visually resembling a moving textual image — layered with impressions, subconscious traces, and raw theoretical fragments.

Thus, Post-Covid Blues embraces dialogue as both format and methodology — a fundamental practice of connection. Where dialogue seeks to unite, it also challenges the trajectory of post-COVID anxiety and detachment. In this context, separation does not destroy connection but instead makes it more visible, reminding us that division, too, can be a form of solidarity, care, and support.

postcovid blues

Yanis: After COVID, coughing has become something infuriating. When a stranger coughs near me, I explode inside and shrink at the same time. It feels like they definitely have COVID and are infecting me right this moment.

Yasya: It’s strange: five years have passed since the pandemic began, yet its echoes still linger. If I see someone wearing a mask in a supermarket, I’ll probably keep my distance. But sound, especially coughing, is an even stronger signal because it’s not just a suspicion of illness; it’s evidence of it.

Hearing, more precisely, noticing a sound, becomes a form of communication, triggering an instinctive choice: to come closer or to step away. And this particular sound is anything but an invitation to come closer.

COVID feels like a thing of the past, yet through sound, it remains present: like a ghost that refuses to disappear. How much time must pass before these triggers fade? Has the pandemic truly ended?

> Salome Voegelin in “Listening to Noise and Silence. Towards A Philosophy Of Sound Art”: “If I notice a concurrent sound, I most likely subsume that heard into the appreciation of the seen: sound fleshes out the visual and renders it real; it gives the image its spatial dimension and temporal dynamic.” ²

Yanis: Once, while walking through a gallery, I heard a cough that wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but everyone seemed to think it was meant for them. That inspired me to create a simple project: an audio installation of coughing placed in a gallery filled with other artworks. After COVID, this idea gained an additional layer of subjectivity — when someone addresses you with a cough, you instinctively turn around.

> Interpellation ³ is a term first introduced by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to describe the process through which ideology influences an individual subject, effectively representing them as an effect. Building on Michel Foucault’s theory, Althusser challenges the classical notion of the subject as the cause and essence; in his view, the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject. Interpolation involves the moment and process of recognizing one’s interaction with a given ideology.

> SEARCH…

Yasya: In the fall of 2024, I went to a play in Vilnius — Krystian Lupa’s adaptation of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The performance lasted five hours, a true test of endurance. The entire story unfolds in a tuberculosis sanatorium, where the sick characters keep coughing in ragged, breathless fits. But from the very start, coughing can also be heard in the audience.

I never quite got used to the sound, flaring up up from different corners of the theater, unsettling me more and more as the play progresses. I feel suffocated, as if the air itself carries something invisible yet oppressive. “Doesn’t it seem like the epidemic isn’t just on stage but right here, in Vilnius?” I whisper to my friend. We never figured out whether it was part of the performance or if a new wave of illness was sweeping through the city.

But it made me think about how sound shapes our behavior, acting as a force of control and order. Horns, bells, traffic signals — and now, coughing. It’s a signal, a sonic marker, a kind of siren. It refuses to dissolve into the background, emerging instead as a distinct figure, a sound that demands attention. It breathes anxiety into the room, tethering itself to fear, to the image of an invisible yet present “other” — the sick one.

> Here’s the thing: imagine you’re in a theater, watching an uplifting play. Good people are doing good things on stage. You’re listening, holding your breath, completely captivated. And then, nearby, someone starts coughing. They cough, and cough, and eventually, because they’re interrupting your enjoyment of the play, you beat them up. And in doing so, you’re committing an act of harm. So, who’s to blame? Who’s the jerk here? The theater and the playwright who wrote the kind, uplifting play for you? The point is, only a truly good person is capable of all kinds of shitty behavior.
KASHLIN, publicist

> Here’s the thing: imagine you’re in a theater, watching an uplifting play. Good people are doing good things on stage. You’re listening, holding your breath, completely captivated. And then, nearby, someone starts coughing. That someone is me. I try to stifle it, hold it back, swallow it down. But it forces its way out. Heads turn. A sigh, a glare, a whispered complaint. I’m not trying to interrupt, not trying to ruin anyone’s moment of beauty, but my body betrays me. And then, eventually, you snap. You, the righteous theatergoer, the lover of all things good and pure. You don’t just glare now — you act. I, by existing in your space, by coughing in your presence, have shattered your illusion of goodness. So tell me, who’s to blame? Who’s the real villain here? Me, for making a sound? Or you, for proving that your patience, your virtue, your ‘goodness’ only lasts as long as the world remains perfectly silent? The point is, only a truly good person is capable of all kinds of shitty behavior.
COUGHIN, visitor

> Misophonia, derived from the Greek words “miso” meaning “hate” and “phonia” meaning “sound,” is a condition where individuals experience strong negative emotional and physical reactions to certain auditory or visual stimuli, commonly known as “triggers.”

Yanis: Sound can be both a source of connection and division. A striking example of sound drawing people together is Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes (1994), in which recordings of Turkish immigrants telling jokes in their native language were broadcast in a Turkish neighborhood in central Oslo. The loudspeaker, mounted on a lamppost, became a magnet, drawing inTurkish immigrants through the familiar cadence of their language. Reflecting on this project, researcher Claire Bishop writes: “An illuminated text in Arabic or a loudspeaker broadcasting in Turkish shifts the relationship between the local and the foreign.” Relational art aims not only to create objects but to shape encounters and moments of connection, mending the tears in the social fabric.

My project, which explores coughing in a museum, moves in the opposite direction — it amplifies separation, fluidly spreading in the social field. And yet, in exposing the rupture and making it more tangible, it forces us to think more deeply about how to bridge it.

> Then, while talking, one of us decided to get the letters C-O-U-G-H*,** in the mouth and cough them out, trying to feel the connection between the sound, its materiality, and the text. Some of the letters remained in the mouth, while others scattered beyond the paper. We decided to record the cough and transcribe this sound into text too. The movement of sound through the material particles of the text was achieved, transitioning from the auditory to the visual, as the real cough merged with its signified — its denomination.*

Yanis: My wife, Dasha, and I spent Christmas and New Year’s 2020/2021 in Istanbul, Turkey, staying there for about a month. Although Covid restrictions in Turkey were quite severe, they did not apply to tourists’ entry, which is why we chose this destination for our vacation. By that time, I had come down with Covid twice – once before the vaccine was available and once afterwards.

It was our first visit to Istanbul, and according to our friends’ stories, the city is usually very crowded. But not that year – the streets were nearly empty. We stayed just 10 meters from Istiklal, one of Istanbul’s most popular pedestrian streets. Almost all shops and cafes were closed, although some operated under inexplicable, unwritten rules.

The most irritating requirement was the need to wear a mask on the street. In general, most tourists disregarded this rule, and the police seemed indifferent. However, vigilant locals could politely indicate — with a swift wave of their hand — that it was advisable to wear one.

> Biopower (or biopolitics), according to Foucault, is a form of power that focuses on regulating the life and health of the population, rather than just controlling territory or political rights. Biopower shapes normative standards, regulates behavior, and influences the perception of normalcy and deviation in society.

Yasya: It seems to me that the sound of coughing can serve a productive purpose. We always talk about fear and warning, and our conversations often take on an anxious tone, but we never move beyond that. Do you remember how our mutual friend told us about their work in a sound art lab, where they explored hospital archives? One artist specifically requested recordings of real people coughing to study sounds of physiological origin, thereby extracting them from their initial semantic field, placing them into an artistic context, and inventing new meanings for them. Could we, too, breathe new life into the sound of coughing, giving it fresh signifiers to deal with in the space of art?

When considering sound in the context of exhibition practices, we must take into account the specific subjective direction of sound as an artistic experience that trancends the materiality of the object. Disturbing sounds can trigger vivid imagery and personal interpretations, prompting viewers to share their feelings and thoughts. This process of mental resonance and subjective listening can foster a sense of community among those who engage with the artwork. Sound prompts us to rise to other perceptual levels which, even when not directly related to the object or source,form a certain “auditory situation.” ⁴ Jean-Luc Nancy aptly referred to these transcendental behaviors of sound as “beyond sound.” ⁵ The question is how, by evoking the very feeling of anxiety, these disorienting auditory situations can contribute to its overcoming. And will they be able to at all?

Yanis: A few days ago, Yasya said she might not come to our friends’ party because she wasn’t feeling well. And on March 1, 2025 — the very last day before the text deadline — she finally did fall ill.

References:

• Chattopadhyay, B. (2017). Beyond matter: Object-disoriented sound art. Seismograf/DMT.
• Chion, M., & Steintrager, J. A. (2016). Sound: An acoulogical treatise. Duke University Press.
• Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening (C. Mandell, Trans.). Fordham University Press.
• Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to noise and silence: Towards a philosophy of sound art. Continuum.
• Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans., pp. 142–147, 166–176). Monthly Review Press.

Footnotes

1. Chion, M., & Steintrager, J. A. (2016). Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Duke University Press. ↩
2. Voegelin, Salomé. (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. ↩
3. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investiga- tion).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 142–7, 166–76. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971 ↩
4. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. (2017). Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art. Seismograf/DMT. ↩
5. Nancy, J-L. (2007). Listening (Transl. Charlotte Mandell). New York: Fordham University Press. ↩