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'A Great Leveller' From The Series Contagion – Colour On The Front Line, 2020 By Aida Silvestri Honfrps Autograph

Aida Silvestri on the myth of Covid-19 as a great leveller

The RPS Honorary Fellow draws parallels between the rhetoric of the pandemic and Britain’s colonial past

‘A great leveller’ from the series Contagion: Colour on the Front Line, 2020 by Aida Silvestri HonFRPS/Autograph

In the early weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown the political message seemed to be that the virus was a great leveller.

“The fact that both the prime minister and the health secretary have contracted the virus is a reminder that the virus does not discriminate,” the then cabinet secretary Michael Gove told a press conference.

This message, disputed by heath experts, also didn’t sit right with UK-based artist Aida Silvestri, who has received an Honorary Fellowship in the 2024 RPS Awards.

At the height of the pandemic, Silvestri remembers picking up a newspaper and seeing “a row of dead brown faces on the front page”. They were some of the frontline workers who had lost their lives to the virus.

At the same time, Black Lives Matter demonstrators were taking to the streets following the murder of George Floyd in America. Hearing politicians claim “we are all in this together” seemed to her not only untrue but uncaring.

'Tobacco' From The Series Contagion Colour On The Front Line, 2020 By Aida Silvestri Autograph

‘Tobacco' from the series Contagion: Colour on the Front Line, 2020 by Aida Silvestri HonFRPS/Autograph

“While most of us were able to isolate safely at home, there were low-income workers out there continuing to work to supply us with commodities,” she argues.

When she was commissioned by Autograph ABP to create new work in response to the pandemic as part of its project Care | Contagion | Community – Self & Other, she felt she owed it to those workers to dig deeper. Taking commodities as her starting point, she looked back into Britain’s imperial past to draw connections between the racial inequalities that endure in society today and the historical extraction of colonial commodities such as sugar, tea and cocoa.

'Tea From The Series Contagion Colour On The Front Line, 2020 By Aida Silvestri Autograph

‘Tea' from the series Contagion: Colour on the Front Line, 2020 by Aida Silvestri HonFRPS/Autograph

After printing portraits of frontline workers onto whitewashed cotton, Silvestri manipulated the material.

“I ‘infected’ them with the drops of tea or cocoa,” she says. “I wanted to show that history was repeating itself, that we were going in circles. The same communities that supplied commodities under the [British] empire were providing them again during Covid-19.”

Uncomfortable with the idea that she was indoors while others were out working, Silvestri started volunteering with migrants in the UK and in France.

“Inequality, injustice, discrimination played a huge role in the deaths of those brown and Black people, and it's something the pandemic highlighted,” she adds. “But there’s a kind of ignorance. Schools don’t teach us about the history of Britain, only the history in Britain.”

A 2020 report by the Insititute of Fiscal Studies indicated death rates among British black Africans and British Pakistanis from coronavirus in English hospitals was more than 2.5 times that of the white population.

Discover more work by Aida Silvestri HonFRPS and meet some of the 2024 RPS Awards recipients in the January-March 2025 issue of the RPS Journal.

The RPS Journal is available exclusively to members. Join us to receive our award-winning magazine and read more inspiring features. Explore full member benefits here.