# Corona Diaries

The concept should be articulate in the open call.

Marcell's notes:
* there is a equivalent to the old-school diary on twitter and facebook happening for years on daily bases
* the old-school diary has an interesting aspect of writing things to yourself. it was introspective and intimate. few would imagine it to be published and if there was an idea about it the date of the publishing would be some time in the unknown future.
* i would like to write and invite people to join in reflecting on the surreal aspects of life which corona virus brought:
* the notion of time: it changed drastically. the notion of time amplifies itself in both directions: it becomes slower and faster at the same time. the gestures known in the art world where artists interview or send letter to past or future self are now getting its "10 days" versions (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtac8tB9BUoQ0ng5_8L5AVQ).
* the strong presence of the possibility of parallel universe (like in the tv show "stranger things") or at least of multiple interpretations what's going on. (for example: a person walking towards you cross the street just in time not to bother you. and then you start to think why you didn't do that in advance so they didn't have to). another one is the anticipation of how the world would look like if "herd immunity" approach gets lucky compared to "social distancing" and containment approach. what if one of them gets extremely bad.
* the strong presence of the statistics, diagrams, chances in the way how we interprete and talk about the world and the future.
* the experience of relying on the grid-alike infrastructures: from internet to roads, electricity, railroads, flights.
* the experience of relying on care and services (medicine and delivery of essentials)
* i would like to write my diary knowing it won't be revealed shortly. but at least three months from now. i would suggest to publish only md5 or sha256 hashes somewhere so that would be the proof that what was written today was not edit any time in the future. (hash function explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BldESGZKB8)
* the way how this kind of diary could be done is to tweet (or publish anywhere else, facebook status, instagram etc.) it like this:
* > 20884af1265fcf60f8de894760555e1b #coronadiary

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Hi Marcel,
Finally some notes of my own and responses to yours.
I like the idea of writing a diary that is private/public somehow, and I really like your idea of a time delay to achieve this.
I also like the idea of a conversation/exchange, as part of the writing. Perhaps one could submit an entry, and get someones elses entry back (without name, but with location and date?)

I came across this note, in an email from a friend
> This, by the way, is the first time in human history that one can communicate from one quarantine to the other one even if it is at the other end of the world. New imaginaries of quarantine will thrive as we move along
It would be nice, to think about this experience in relation to diary - being alone/private and connected.

The pandemic is about living and dying. How we live and die together. About connection and isolation. It evokes one love, one humanity - and it demonstrates the inequalities that devide us - both at the same time.

### CONVERSATIONS

I also still like the idea of diary entries that you send and receive between strangers. A hybrid between conversation and diary - the same way that we're in a hybrid between being alone and together.

To explore this I had a conversation with the theatre director Lotte van den Berg in the meantime. I previously worked with her on the theatre series dying together, that explored how we live together, by enacting moments of collective death with the audience on the stage https://www.thirdspace.nl/en/werk/dying-together/
After the performance, the audience would write down their experience, which was then added to a growing archive of dying together notes. It seemed to me, that what we tried to enact theatrically in the performance, is now happening in real time in the world. The archive is quite powerfull, so it's a reference for coronadiaries.

Lotte was interested in conversations between people (based on her buildingconversations project https://buildingconversation.nl/en/), not necessarily diaries. This could merge with our exploration or become a different branch.
How to connect with other isolated people in potentially radiacally different situations. Corona chatroulette https://chatroulette.com.

Do something 'universal' with another isolated being. Dring a glass of water. Look at each other in silence.
Some kind of wake or shared moment of silence could work.

Following this chat, I had to think of non-online shared moments. A new kind of theatre of the streets, that is performed for and from windows and balconies.

* Spain, collective balcony exercise https://www.instagram.com/p/B9wsIvLgejU/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=12
* The 8pm applause for the care staff in NL (inspired by spain), that was quite impressive here in town.
* Italys making music together from balconies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PWARU5LJOE
* Wedding on the streets of NY, from a balcony https://news.sky.com/video/coronavirus-new-york-couple-wed-on-street-11961629

### OTHER CORONA DIARY PROJECTS

in france, the archive of Vosges asked its inhabitants to send in their personal stories on how are they living through this time of confinement to archiving them as a project of collective memory

https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/grand-est/vosges/epinal/coronavirus-departement-vosges-lance-appel-temoignages-quotidien-confinement-1803560.html

The Süddeutsche Zeitung started a call for reader diaries. It is a sort of long online form, that is worth looking at for reference.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/corona-kollektives-tagebuch-1.4852507?sc_src=email_1445529&sc_lid=129958242&sc_uid=yQhRMykCtb&sc_llid=99911&utm_medium=email&utm_source=emarsys&utm_content=www.sueddeutsche.de%2Fpanorama%2Fcorona-kollektives-tagebuch-1.4852507&utm_campaign=Espresso+am+Abend+24.03.2020