Have you ever read “The Best and The Worst of The Art World” which Artnet publishes every Friday? It is a bullet point list of news divided into two categories, predictably “Best” and “Worst”. Reading it is for fun. It is like taking a quiz in which one can also learn by reading just the news in capsules. Often, while going through the list, I become curious about something and decide to go deeper by clicking on the article links. It was in this way that I found out about the popular video series, “2 Lizards”. The project was launched on Instagram IGTV in early March by artist Meriem Bennani, in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Orian Barki (both millennials and based in New York).
The series is presented in 2-minute episodes mixing 3D-renderings of animals set against real footage. The main characters are two lizards living in Brooklyn during the lockdown sharing their thoughts, concerns, and feelings of isolation. The neighbours are animals of other species. Since the first episode (there are five to date), the artist duo has been contacted by creatives willing to contribute to the project. So, they opened up and started remote collaborations with friends and peers, adding soundtracks and voices to the films.
Episode 1 went viral getting more than 154k views at the time of writing. How comes that these short videos are so popular??? They are comforting. We can easily identify with the animated characters as they express our own feelings perfectly. In fact, both plots and dialogues are taken from everyday situations we are all living through in this strange time of social distancing. In the first chapter, the 2 lizards snoop at their neighbourhood from a terrace while conversing on the quarantine optimistically. “In a fucked up way, I’m loving this,” says one. The other answers back: “That is such a quarantine week one thing to say.”
Episode 4 is about a feline nurse’s day-to-day life who talks with the two reptiles. The cat-nurse reports one heart-breaking event that happened during one of her shifts at the hospital. A patient connected to a ventilator, telephones his wife. The nurse, who was holding the mobile to the patient’s ear, explains how bad she felt as all the wife could hear was a ventilator. The video ends with the ubiquitous clapping for carers from balconies, and the nurse asserting “this pandemic has made me way cooler than I really am.”
Episode 5 is probably the most iconic of the series until now. The 2 reptiles go out for a stroll in a deserted New York City. They discuss how the city has changed and how, after all, still looks normal if not for the frozen economy. At a certain point, one of the lizards gets a call from her French mother. The mother-daughter chat reveals a condition familiar to many living in big cities, living overseas from their families while having news updates from home countries. When the phone call ends, the other companion needs to pee. Soon the buddies realise nothing is really the same during the lockdown. Starbucks is closed, and the lizard answers the call of nature in Time Square, pointing out that there is nobody around.
Bennani and Barki cunningly translate what we hear and see on TV and social media onto these witty micro-videos. What I felt from watching the episodes is that I am a person like many others. I find in these short animations something that belongs to me too, hope and anxiety. The reptiles’ lives and their dialogues perfectly embody our current ordinary in the uncertainty of the pandemic.
