Watch archeologists from the future dig up the mystery of the Covid-19 pandemic

What will happen to future generations when they stumble across long-forgotten piles of face masks and ventilators from the distant year of 2020?

In a new video for Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Musia Totibadze imagines how future archeologists might understand the Covid-19 pandemic after unearthing the objects we’ve left behind.

The clip follows the artist as she kneels among the dunes of a desert: the museum’s former site in a dystopian, future Moscow. She chats to her computer’s operating system — an animated character with bright blue hair — while using tools attached to her nail extensions to sift for artifacts in the sand.

The video was released as part of Garage’s latest exhibition, Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene. The show reflects on the apocalyptic futures that could be unleashed by the Covid crisis, while Totibadze’s video “hypothesises how the ‘Coronacene’ might one day enter historical memory, and [explores] how our current moment has upended conventional understandings of past and future.”

Incorporating work that ranges from sound installations to sculptures, Assuming Distance offers a logical and parodic take on future culture, encompassing everything from underground societies to alternative medicine.

Totibadze’s work gives a glimpse of the style of the 11 pieces selected for the exhibition, which is designed to resemble a computer game. Viewers follow a route around the gallery marked by questionnaires, application forms, and other tasks that reference the pandemic bureaucracy.

Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene is open until 1 August. You can find more information here.