Equinox season is a time of transition—in the southern hemisphere, mother nature is animating landscapes with spectral siennas. Up north, half the world is emerging from a harrowing pandemic winter. Widespread vaccination efforts have arrived in tandem with this rebirth, offering apparent liberation from the coronavirus’s twelve-month strong shackles. Hamburg-based street artist LAPIZ appears, at first blush, to celebrate the milestone with his latest work, a wheatpaste titled ‘Reisefieber.’
The German phrase ‘Reisefieber’ roughly translates to ‘travel fever,’ the anxious excitement before embarking on a voyage. “The population has been very mature; it has been going along with the up and downs the lockdowns and re-openings,” LAPIZ explains in his statement for the piece. “It is time to collect the reward: Pack the bags and leave.”
LAPIZ honors his medium’s inherent rebellion by refusing to take reality at face value, always questioning. Over email, LAPIZ elaborated that this figure channels a quintessential Mallorca tourist, “which is a bit like spring break for the working class.” The soon-to-be traveler looks cheery. Clad in the perfunctory colorful shirt, socks with sandals, and pragmatic hat, the traveler trades his mask for the band-aid on his arm, signifying his status: vaccinated.
While it is wonderful that there are multiple vaccines on the market, ‘Reisefieber’ implores viewers to understand the global picture. “Rich countries (which count for ~14% of the world’s population) have bought 54% of the global available vaccine doses while many countries like Nigeria (with a population of 200 million) do not get any,” the artist’s statement notes. What’s worse, global ‘north’ countries, which we colloquially consider ‘first world,’ have shot down proposals to make the science more accessible.
“At the World Trade Organization on Wednesday, the United States and a small number of wealthy countries with ready access to vaccines blocked a proposal by India and South Africa to temporarily waive countries’ obligation to enforce patents on covid-19 technologies, including vaccines, during the pandemic,” The Washington Post reported on March 10th, 2021. This move worsens the deepening divide dubbed “vaccine apartheid,” as reported by The Guardian on March 31st, 2021.
A closer look at ‘Reisefieber’ elucidates the artist’s true intentions. The traveler’s suitcase features flags from countries including “Brazil and South Africa which are ‘exotic’ locations and both have new mutations that are more dangerous,” as LAPIZ elaborated over email. “Thailand and Vietnam are in there as prime German travel locations. Cuba, because they do not have any access to vaccines because of the US blockade (instead they produce their own.)”
“And then there is Nigeria,” he continued. “This is not a tourist destination and has a horrible reputation. It is a country with over 200 million people of which no one gets to be vaccinated in the foreseeable future.”
When street art is created and placed on the streets, the artist relinquishes their work to the public, who collectively divines its meaning within the greater context. LAPIZ made the strategic move to place ‘Reisefieber’ by a travel agency in Hamburg’s hip Sankt Pauli district. Funny enough, one agent wrote him a thank you the next morning for thinking of them.
“Somehow I thought it would be more obvious that it is a piece about vaccine injustice/nationalism and not my inner need to travel,” the artist mused. “Everyone just sees what they want in the end. Let’s change that.”
While LAPIZ has been a working artist for nearly a decade, the rebel was once a trained virologist in his past life. From this informed standpoint, he laid out the facts he wants the public to see. Withholding vaccines out of greed or incompetence damages eradication efforts for even the wealthiest nations as the virus, uninhibited, adapts. “I think it will do so via the spike protein (the molecule the vaccines target) resulting in less effective vaccines,” LAPIZ noted. “Then the vaccines will need an update, a patch so to speak.” Thus, the vicious cycle could continue.
Rather than addressing the problem at its core, the global approach to coronavirus mimics approaches to criminality and poverty and all the like—band-aid solutions are applied and root causes are neglected, again, out of either greed or incompetence. LAPIZ imagines that coronavirus could become another preventable illness plaguing particular parts of the globe. “Yellow fever, for example, could be eradicated,” he wrote. “Instead you take a jab in Europe, where there is no yellow fever, to not get infected in Bolivia, rather than vaccinating all of Bolivia.”
The artist noted that the yellow of the tourist’s shirt in ‘Reisefieber’ speaks directly to the impending ‘vaccine passport’ because that’s the status symbol’s hue in Germany. “Depending on your status, you’re allowed to do certain things, depending on which vaccine you got you might get advantages,” he wrote. “If it would be just, there wouldn’t be the need for status.”
Even with all the snafus unfolding like a slow motion train wreck, LAPIZ did state, “I am not vaccinated but if I could I would get it in this moment.” It is a good thing people are getting vaccinated. It is an amazing thing these vaccines exist. But if society wants the problem to get better, then this is not the end. The answer? Get vaccinated, yes, but don’t stop making noise, making art, making visible the plight of this present world order where a solution for some is considered a sufficient solution for all. Otherwise, we’ll always have worse illnesses to worry about than simple ‘Reisefieber.’
[…] wrote a beautiful piece about this work for Street Art United states. The article can be found here and some more information about the poster on this site, […]