Ludvig Peres

From a Blue Sky is an ongoing project that brings to light the personal experiences of students in Chicago public schools during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In this body of work, I visualize the early days of remote learning, and collaborate with students on photo-sculptural pieces, giving them a platform to share their personal experiences on how the pandemic has affected their lives. As students have spent their crucial developing years in isolation from their peers, the project’s goal is to bring to light how they coped with their situation while attending school in the midst of a pandemic.

In the following of the Covid-19 epidemic, Chicago Public Schools made the decision to conduct all classes remotely until further notice. This decision created an array of different challenges for the individual schools, as well as the students and their families. 

This project aims to document how the Covid-19 epidemic changed the students’ day to day routines and how switching to remote learning impacted them and their families’ lives. My approach is to project and photograph ongoing online classes onto the walls of the empty classrooms, and then to project photos of the empty classrooms into students’ homes while they are in class. Thus metaphorically bringing the students back to school and the school back to the students.

From a Blue Sky is an ongoing project that brings to light the personal experiences of students in Chicago public schools during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In this body of work, I visualize the early days of remote learning, and collaborate with students on photo-sculptural pieces, giving them a platform to share their personal experiences on how the pandemic has affected their lives. As students have spent their crucial developing years in isolation from their peers, the project’s goal is to bring to light how they coped with their situation while attending school in the midst of a pandemic.

The photo-sculptures are created by 3D scanning and printing portraits of students, where I collage photographs captured by the 3D scanner onto the 3D print. I ask each student to submit writings about how the pandemic has personally affected them. I then project these writings onto spaces in the school and photograph them. The finished photos function metaphorically as projections of the students’ thoughts and experiences, illuminating the invisible hardships they have carried while attending school for the past two years of the pandemic.