Starting with the first lockdown in March, specifically from the fifth day, Daniel Blaufuks reproduces the same format as the weather report videos David Lynch has since added to his Instagram. In these short clips, Lynch reads weather forecasts, commenting poetically on the boring thermal variation of Los Angeles, where he lives and works. There are also other segments, like the lottery, where the only purpose seems to be the pleasure of picking numbers at random. It is evident the increase of these daily records in recent times, like Hans Ulrich Obrist. The director of the Serpentine galleries and super-curator publishes on TikTok several bits of a few seconds with interviews with animals, where he asks: “Can you tell me about your unfulfilled projects?”, in an alternative continuation to his long-term work in collaboration with e-flux: Agency of Unrealised Projects.

Blaufuks, for his part, dedicates himself to a persona with indefinite nationality, who is in several European countries, presenting the weather report and making some observations on the current political situation. The attempt to exhaust the material seems to be the exercise of irony: how relevant is the weather when we are locked up at home by obligation? Even more so when we often do not know where the presenter is. Is he in France? Lisbon? Or, more recently, on the Island of Saint Helena. He has already wondered “— For how long will I have the patience to make these weather reports?!”. He also adds that, with the new lockdown, he will stay at home drawing rainbows…

@blaufuks_daily, which is currently part of the exhibition Free Lunch at the Jean-Kenta Gauthier Gallery in Paris, is a form of portrait (or self-portrait) that explores the private place and the confrontation of the domestic place, conditions that the artist had already analysed before the notion of lockdown became widespread. By mapping the progression of light filtered through a window of his house, or by multiplying the image of a cup, the object becomes, according to the artist, a formula for the perception of space as a place of meta-temporal infinity. As in his work, @blaufuks_daily develops in series a kind of survival journal, which, overall, is comparable to his more conventional body of artistic work.

That said, it is challenging to think of what other ways this project could be presented in a non-digital exhibition space, or if its artistic existence is limited to the online and real-time only. Do the immediacy and the ability to reach a wide audience on social media leads us to rethink the role of the audience and cultural institutions? How can these archives operate in the long term? And when is the right time to end them?