Some key themes of Variants:
The image shows an old people’s home in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The message, ‘andrà tutto bene’ roughly translates as ‘it’s going to be OK’. This was the slogan used by the then Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to encourage his people through those testing times (similar to most other state leaders). What claim can and could Conte make to justify such optimism? The idea that we were in this together, similar to the pandemic messaging all over the world, is simply not borne out by concomitant variations in our bodily resistance to pandemic morbidity and mortality. His slogan belies another reality: it’s going to be/go better if you are:
- not poor,
- not obese,
- not diabetic,
- not breathing in polluted air and
- do not suffer from existing health conditions.
What about the person on the ground? It is easy to be dismissive and think ‘what difference can I make?’ both to remote issues like global affairs, pandemics or my own bodily life course. But just as not-voting would mean my little voice wouldn’t count towards a larger, collective discourse impacting on my existence, so not-caring about my own health means one active cog within a multitude of factors influencing my life course remains unignited.
This is what underpins my work as a ‘health hesitancy campaigner’: we rarely ‘hesitate’ when voting or vaccinating, so why is there so much hesitancy linked to caring for one’s health? There is not just reason but plenty of evidence to be optimistic about the possibilities for creating more beneficial health trajectories for everybody – it can certainly ‘go better’ and possibly even ‘go OK’!
Millions of tonnes of cargo pass through the port of Hamburg every year – a glimpse of this can be seen in the accompanying image. This means that growers, pickers, packers, processors, transporters, sellers and buyers across the globe intersect in getting something from somewhere to someone else, somewhere else. That’s a messy, complex statement reflecting a multifaceted operation made up of thousands of micro actions.
Since the pandemic, most of us are familiar with the term ' R rate' - the reproduction rate of a virus within a given population. What other R rates do we enable through the port of Hamburg? The delivery of fizzy, sugary drinks or confectionary or cheap goods produced by workers on very low wages or single use plastic. It is not so much a question of 'levelling up' (as promoted by the UK government in recent years) but linking up that needs to be our main concern regarding the R rates that emerge as much in a virus as in society and the economy at large.
How do the norms and dreams of society and its citizens influence the world we live in? The image on the left is of a mountain around Lake Garda and a ‘real butterfly’ photographed on top of that mountain. This is Nature; this is astonishing, radical, beautiful Nature. I do not wish to promote what some refer to as ‘the fallacy of Nature’, namely, that there is something fixed and truthful about Nature, which is always superior to human intervention and contaminated by the irreverent and anthropocentric actions of the people of our planet.
Instead, what I do want to emphasise with this juxtaposition and distortion of colour and size is that we have the ability to appreciate Nature and play with it, to find new thrills within it: our norms and dreams should constantly tug at one another to explore ways of coexisting that work at an individual and societal level.
Variants aims to promote the following ideas:
- Health is not fixed - there is a certain amount of wiggle room
- Linking up government, corporate, NGO and civil society agencies to improve health outcomes as a collective
- Health can be significantly shaped by an individual unlike e.g. air pollution
- Being in good health is now a better predictor of future employment opportunities than education
- Taking more control over your ‘bodily sovereignty’ is both enjoyable and empowering
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