Recently in Seattle “normal life” has become a thing again. After losing its unspoken authority and drifting into the realm of signification, it is now something urgent to remember and authentically re-enact. The city’s commercial life resembles itself once more, with storefronts—boarded up in the midst of demonstrations and protests—uncovered and eager shoppers unmasked. By contrast, in Seattle’s residential neighborhoods, new versions of old problems are returning in various acts of covering up; fresh picket fences serve as demure markers of a supercharged housing market whose companion, homelessness, is now increasingly represented by its cipher—rings of plastic netting signifying a public space recently swept of a tent, an unhoused person, and all their belongings.

June’s record-breaking heat wave exacerbated these disparities and arrived like the pandemic’s second act, further distorting the symbolic “return to normal.” The city’s beaches were unusually packed with people cooling off in the water, soaking up the strange weather and retreating from the land in minor acts of climate migration. The longing for a return to “normal life” is a longing for truce: a respite from the monumental divisions created by inequality, systemic racism, and climate change, which bookend the lockdown. Norms, the philosopher Georges Canguilhem wrote, offer themselves “as a possible mode of unifying diversity, resolving a difference, settling a disagreement.”

Our exuberance to embrace friends and family once again is one part of a complex to-ing and fro-ing taking shape intimately, publicly, and in Seattle’s cultural institutions. “Murmurations,” a recently launched collaboration between six of the city’s major cultural institutions (Frye Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, Velocity Dance Center, and the nonprofit for performing arts On the Boards) is a hopeful case in point. In a city like Seattle where arts institutions exist in a delicate ecosystem regularly warped by billionaire passion projects like the Seattle Art Fair or the Cinerama, the announcement of this curator- driven collaboration came as a welcome surprise.

More a critical infrastructure project for the arts than a discrete event or batch of programming, “Murmurations” takes its name from a different kind of collaborative network—the swarming formations of starlings. Flying in complex assemblies, starlings survive by moving in unison and leveraging local interactions for their broader, emergent effects. Similarly, this pandemic-born collaboration arose organically from intensified neighborly communication and a collective desire to navigate uncertain territory together. It is a survival strategy also seen in Philadelphia, where a similar-sized group of cultural institutions, calling themselves the Philadelphia Collaborative Arts Consortium, have also banded together to share operating structures and acosts as well as knowledge, expertise, and audiences.

While a full infrastructure for co-authoring new exhibitions and events is in its infancy, the member organizations of “Murmurations” have been at work on productions in conjunction with pre-existing exhibitions and events since their official launch in late April. The programming thus far has eschewed shared themes for collaborative takes on shared concerns, such as how to move “beyond the challenges and confines of the space of the screen,” according to Henry curator Nina Bozicnik.

In late April, the Frye Art Museum and On the Boards co-presented a performance by the storyteller and artist Sadiqua Iman in response to poet-artist Anastacia-Reneé’s solo exhibition at the Frye, “(Don’t be Absurd) Alice in Parts.” Filmed in the galleries and broadcast online when the museum was still restricted to 25-percent capacity, Iman’s movement-based performance, entitled Momentum of the Muse: if Alice . . . (2021), offered a refreshing counterpoint to the oppressive neutrality of the disembodied walkthrough.

This was followed by the Drive-in at On the Boards, a multi-evening outdoor screening event curated by the Henry. It included films like Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Afro-futurist Drexicya (2010) and Enrique Ramírez’s shamanistic Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Who Walks) (2011–14), which deal poetically with narratives of colonization and resistance. While socially-distanced and vehicularly-podded, these drive-in screenings followed state governor Jay Inslee’s announcement of open vaccine eligibility and were an early instance of Seattle’s cultural life moving off of—if not yet away from—the omnipresent pandemic screen.

The next “Murmurations” project is the exhibition “Lux Aeterna,” the result of a year-long research collaboration between the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and Northwest Film Forum focusing on technical migration and image circulation. Centered around obsolete technologies that refuse to extinguish or disappear, the exhibition’s press release asks: “As images lose fidelity to the circumstances that created them, are they degraded or liberated?” A similar question could be asked of Seattle’s arts institutions as they embark on collaborations like “Murmurations.” Flying in this new open territory, will they be liberated or degraded in their search for new norms? For the institutions involved, the return to “normal life” may prove as demanding as its hiatus.