The Covid-19 pandemic has not only provoked a global health crisis but has also brought about severe bio-social consequences with regard to the interactional space people inhabit, where they routinely enact their daily practices and communicate with other individuals. Some of the most crucial public policies people have experienced particularly over the first two years of the pandemic due to the high infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 have been lockdowns, social distancing and the wearing of face masks. As a consequence, the pandemic has deeply changed the multisensorial ways through which people have engaged with each other: Our proxemic orientation in focused gatherings, displayed by body position, posture, gaze, addressed gestures and shared attention (Mondada 2013), has shifted significantly. Studies have shown that face-to-face communication between interlocutors wearing a face mask obstructs understanding each other at least partially, especially with regard to higher pitched voices; in addition to that, it covers the middle and lower face as a field of gestural expression (Mheidly et al. 2020).

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