“The Hindered Touch”

In the second installment of a three-part series, Gaudêncio Fidelis writes about how one of our most urgent senses, touch, has been stigmatized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fidelis starts with an emblematic image, Michalangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” wherein God’s touch imparts the “breath of life” and creates man in his likeness. In the fresco, God is circumscribed within the form of a human brain, which connects his hand to knowledge and by extension, to science. God then becomes an “artist” by creating the first “sculpture” to inhabit the earth. In this conception of man’s first moment, touch was, and continues to be an important way we understand the world around us, a world both seductive and dangerous.

Fidelis illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitates physical isolation, creates an ontological problem, challenging beliefs about creation as it has been culturally constructed. 

Part I of the series, “The Forgotten Nerve,” is linked here.