“Lockdown Diary”: Everyday Life under Covid-19: a visual-cultural and academic exploration of 5 countries during the pandemic

This visual-cultural and academic project explores everyday life during Covid-19 through a comparative analysis of diaries from 5 countries. It will reveal how people have made sense of their lives during the pandemic by drawing on different cultural scripts of everyday life. The project connects the academic study of the quotidian with a film that will bring the diaries to life for public audiences. The film will make viewers reflect on their own responses in light of other people’s experiences. The project will illuminate everyday life as a culturally formed active resource for people at a time of crisis. The global pandemic has prompted a global collection of diaries. There are 450 initiatives by museums, literary societies and communities. These “diaries” are a unique global archive of people’s lives, feelings and stories. They call for a bold reconsideration of everyday life. Conventionally, everyday life has been treated as the realm of mundane routines and continuity in opposition to the drama, change and uncertainty of public life. “Lockdown”, however, put “normal” daily life in question. The project will conduct a comparative analysis of diaries, paying attention to age, gender, household size, technology and other critical factors and study them for central themes. The applicants have already identified rich collections in Finland, Sweden, Italy, California and are now investigating available data in Africa and Latin America. The output will be a 45 minute long film in which actors in a Zoom-like setting will act out short passages from the selected diaries. The film will be organised around themes to illustrate parallels and differences between societies. It will be aimed at theatres, public spaces, digital media, and museums, accompanied by a publication that will put the diaries in context, discuss main themes and relate them to the literature on everyday life.