E-Paper
Covid-19 connect: Dealing with isolation in social distancing through art
People from different walks of life are using visuals, sounds and graphics, on Instagram, to tell stories of their lives in quarantine.
“Working from home has been a mixed bag of fun. For our little family of four, getting to spend more hours together has been great,’’ writes Francis from Kenya. Himani, a teacher from Mumbai, says, “I recently made my students draw themselves as potatoes to show them what they’d look like if they chose to eat unhealthy during the quarantine.’’ Whereas, Estefania, a consultant in the USA, describes, “My son continues to go back and forth between his dad’s house and mine, which underscores the bond we have as a blended family.”
Many such stories, dotted in a grid pattern, are narrated on an Instagram handle called 6ft love, which aims to bridge the six feet physical distance through emotional connections.
The motivating factor to start this page was: To have a space full of kind messages and stories so that people don’t feel alone! The trans US-India team that has conceived this page includes urban planners Sabah Usmani, Sera Tolgay, Akemi Sato, designer Mira Khandpur, illustrators Diana Ang, Aashti Miller and Nikita Notowidigdo, and an environment and social specialist Daphne Yin.
Every day, this Insta page profiles an individual’s story, including an illustration and a quote of how they are navigating the outbreak and dealing with physical distancing. “We are gathering stories spanning a diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and geographies. We welcome stories submitted in any language, and include quotes in their original language alongside an English translation. We aim to create the world’s largest Social (Distance) Network. I felt that there was a need to spread the message that just because we are practising physical distancing, it doesn’t mean we can’t be social or connect with people, be it our loved ones or strangers,” says Sabah Usmani, the brain behind this project. The team has so far profiled stories from more than 18 countries, 37 cities, and 50 professionals ranging from doctors and domestic workers to logistics operators, comedians and writers.
The desire to document the quarantine and connect people also inspired three advertising professionals in Spain’s Barcelona to start Covid Art Museum on Instagram. The page displays artworks submitted by people across the world, created on different coronavirus themes spanning from toilet papers to social distancing. Emma Calvo, Irene Llorca and Jose Guerrero, the founders of this project, share, “Few days into the quarantine in Spain, and we realised that people were sharing artworks that they created during their isolation. We could sense a movement here and asked ourselves what would happen with all of this art. We didn’t want these artworks to be forgotten; so we came up with the idea of a digital museum, to make them more accessible to people all over the world.’’
This team receives around 200 proposals every day from the world over. “The aim is to create a Covid Art Museum to serve as an archive to remember using art that collective feeling as it was expressed by people during the confinement. And, it can also be a meeting point between artists and other professionals in the creative world, generating fruitful connections,” adds Calvo.
Back home in India, a team at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts — soon after lockdown — started brainstorming ideas on how to stay connected with their audience. What emerged from this search is the Surviving SQ (self-quarantine) series. A part of the series is Pallavi Paul’s Share Your Quiet project, which had invited people in isolation to share 10 second sound bytes of silence or old sounds that were forgotten, or new ones that have been discovered during this time. “The recordings we collected were streamed on Mondays as a symphony of silence. We received entries from more than 850 individuals from places as far as Norway, Serbia, Japan, New Zealand, New York, Milan, and Paris to as close as Panjim in Goa,” shares Leandre D’souza, curator at Sunapatra, adding, “We wanted to discover beauty in the emptiness of public spaces. What got us started is the desire to engage actively with our community, and encourage a more participatory, thought-provoking and introspective dialogue with them.”
Author tweets @Bhagat_Mallika
