Dear 2020

Early 2021, I was reflecting on how the year Twenty-twenty [2020] shaped our lives in ways we could not have imagined - it felt like happenings in a century were compressed into one calendar year. The year was characterized by twists and turns and what can be termed 'unimaginable' events.

In the early days of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit us hard and resulted in the loss of lives and an economic downturn. The government imposed lockdowns meant people had to stay at home and many could not work and feed. It was indeed a tough time. By June, during the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd by police officers brought back the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Protest of 2020 which has been described as one of the largest social movements in the world as millions across the globe, especially the United States, came out to protest police brutality and injustice. In the last quarter of the year, the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria were also a response to police brutality and disregard for human rights by the Nigerian Authorities. These decentralized protests saw thousands of young Nigerians take to the streets for two weeks calling for the end of the notorious police unit, SARS. While these were broad general issues that happened in 2020, many people had personal experiences in their lives.

This project, Dear 2020 is a personal attempt to visualize the experiences - wins and losses, highs and lows, as well as personal events from the year 2020 - of people around me, in a bid to document the year and serve as a reference to human resilience. I sourced personal images from the respondents and simulated handwritten notes of conversations with them, which were combined to form photo diptychs. 

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