The Sky Inside

On March 14, 2020, the Spanish government decreed the State of Alarm for the second time since the approval of the current constitution in 1978. It was the response to a pandemic caused by COVID-19 and implied strict confinement of the entire population, forcing citizens to stay locked up in their homes. They could only go out on the street the essential time to acquire food and medicine, attend emergencies and, in some specific cases, go to their workplace.
This extraordinary measure came into force on the same day at 23:48 and was active until May 3, the date on which the conditions of the quarantine began to relax.
Over the following weeks, this forced confinement caused an increase in anxiety in a large part of the population.
The photographer Oscar Ciutat took the 49 photographs from this serie between March 16 and May 3 from a small balcony of his Barcelona apartment as a reaction to the stress derived from the sum of this confinement and the constant informative bombardment around the pandemic. By doing so, Oscar turned the daily gesture of looking at the sky into a small act of resistance and hope.

«Friable, fluid, rocky, flammable and volatile stretches of sky, specks of sky, gusts of sky, heaps of sky. Sky is omnipresent, even in darkness under the skin.» - Wislawa Szymborska, Sky