Workshops

Fellows’Project

Other Places

It was October 2020 when I started this project. Back then, we were several months into the pandemic and still unsure what the next months or even years would look like. Personally, I was feeling adrift, having just moved to Brooklyn after years living in Queens and experiencing a life very different from what I expected when 2020 started.

A few months before, I had received an Andrew Mellon Fellowship from the Center for Humanities and I was supposed to develop a project with my students from City College on climate change and psychology. The problem however was that, due to the pandemic, I was laid off, and I no longer had students. So, there I was, on my living room, wondering what to do with the grant. And it was precisely from that experience of being looking from my window - both physically and metaphorically – while feeling a sense of isolation and connection that I decided to create this project.

The idea was simple. Create a space where the CUNY community could share and reflect on their own pandemic experiences through meaningful, creative, and art-based tools. As I am somewhat undecided person,and I could not choose whether I prefered to create a small and cozy space for a limited number of students or a public-facing project to reach the CUNY community at large using Twitter and Padlet as generative tools. Therefore, I decided to do both, and this website archives the memory of those interventions.

Scrolling through the website, you will immerse yourself in this sense-making project called "From My Window ... and Other Places". These two aspects — the window and the other places — encapsulate the contradictory nature of what we experienced during the pandemic: being confined and yet connected to several other places around the world.

The website was designed to be experienced slowly, with quietude and curiosity. As you explore the website, you will be invited to open and dive into different facets and memory artifacts created by from my window's fellows and the CUNY community at large. In the first part of the website, you will be introduced to From My Window, the experiences and poetic-art-based pieces created by seven graduate and undergraduate CUNY students. During Spring 2021, these seven participants and I met via Zoom in workshops, where we collectively learned how to draw, color, create digital collages, and write I-Poems. The memory of these storytelling workshops, as well as the individual pieces created by the each fellow are available here for exploration.

The second part of the website archives "Other Places." As we experienced during the pandemic, even in the most isolating times, we sought connection with people located in other places and this section documents that. You will be able to see a beautiful Padlet created by the CUNY community, which maps people’s affective relationships around the world. By exploring Padlet, you will find individuals who danced every week with their siblings and others who shared tea with friends thousands of miles away. Exploring the dots carefully is a warming experience of discovering the various creative ways people used to cope with isolation. After the Padlet, you will find the bi-weekly prompts we launched on then Twitter, inviting the CUNY community to share glimpses of their lives and how they were feeling at that moment. There are over 100 tweets in this bank of responses using the hashtag #CUNYFromMyWindow.

It was from our windows, connected to other places, that many of us witnessed the births of our friends' babies or their weddings. From our windows, connected to other places, many of us celebrated our own birthdays and the birthdays of friends and family, wishing we could be there, in person. And it was probably from there, from our windows and other places, that we shared our doubts about the future, milestones and accomplishments, losses, and a deep sense of disembodiment.

This year (2026), marking the sixth anniversary of the World Health Organization's declaration of a global pandemic, we are launching this website to host and archive a small portion of the complexity of that time and the ambiguity of our feelings. Here, we present our individual and collective efforts to make sense of what was happening while it was happening. I hope you will take your time and enjoy this project.

Fernanda Blanco Vidal
Phd Candidate at Critical Social Environmental Psychology Program
Former Fellow from the Teaching Learning Center and the Center for Humanities