24 hours on lockdown in three worlds: A visual archive
Coronavirus has changed everything, but the 24 hours in a day. We created an Instagram page to show how three young people around the world lived them alone, together.
Only a couple of months ago, a generation of young people was planning careers, studies, travels and dreams that spanned across continents. Now as the coronavirus is shutting down cities, cancelling flights and confining people at home, their future is uncertain.
We, Isabella Haberstock de Carvalho and Irina Anghel, are also part of this generation. This year was the first year of our journalism graduate programme at Sciences Po in Paris. But when France went on lockdown in March, we were sent home to continue our classes online together with our classmates and friends from, quite literally, all over the world.
So when our Visual Storytelling Online teacher and all-round mighty visual magician Audrey Cerdan told us over Zoom that our final project was to tell a visual story about the coronavirus whilst in confinement, some of us were watching from our childhood bedrooms in our home countries, others from their flats in Paris, and others from their friends’ houses where they’d just moved in.
Either way, for each of us it was complicated. Complicated and different. And we wanted our project to reflect this somehow.
The idea behind our project was simple. We wanted to document what this new reality looked like for different people, and also highlight the sense of togetherness that comes with the experience of mass isolation.
So we thought of one thing that we all share. Time. The skeleton of a day that is made of 24 hours everywhere around the world, and that we all move and fill in different ways, simultaneously. Even under lockdown.
That’s how we decided to show how three young people from around the world lived the same day in confinement, and what they were doing at the same moment in their respective time zones.
Power to the people
Ravini, 22-year-old from Colombo, Sri Lanka, was interning at the International Trade Center in Colombo when the lockdown began on March 20th.
A few time zones away Greta, a 21-year-old Italian management student, was on a train home to Udine from Turin, where she studies, when the Italian government announced a nationwide lockdown on the 9th of March.
Across the channel, Liam, a 19-year-old medical student from London, began working on a research project on COVID-19 soon after the UK entered into lockdown on the 23rd of March.
Their personal stories are set against the backdrop of very different confinement policies.
In Sri Lanka a very strict lockdown, locally referred to as a ‘curfew’, was imposed quite early, meaning they were able to contain the virus and have relatively few cases and deaths. There no one is allowed on the streets, but food-delivery services are provided.
Italy instead is one of the worst affected countries by the virus. Lockdown there means people are allowed to go outside for essential activities such as grocery shopping, but all non-essential businesses, schools and universities are closed.
The UK has a very similar confinement policy, even though they were one of the last European countries to go into lockdown and now have a significant number of cases.
We asked them to join our project and help us show the different shapes lockdown can take within 24 hours. They said yes.
Next, we placed the power of the project in their hands.
We gave them the freedom to share their lockdown experiences by photographing their days as they wanted. This enebled us to report a story creatively without leaving our houses, but also meant we were showing what a day in lockdown looks like in the most auhentic way possible: through the eyes of people living it.
We gave them general guidelines of what type of photos they could take, and then established a day where they could all document their activities. Greta and Ravini sent their photos to us throughout the day, with short captions of what they were doing. Liam sent all of his all in the evening, as he was too busy at work during the day.
After the day was over, we asked them a few questions about how they are feeling during this lockdown to better understand their worries, hopes and dreams for present and future times.
So if the posts have the almost-intimate feeling of photos or texts you would receive from a friend telling you abouf their day, it’s because that’s exactly what they are.
The result? Three different realities in the same 24 hours in lockdown, and one big picture (or Instagram grid) of how a pandemic changes the lives of young people.
If there’s one thing that ties Ravini, Greta and Liam together, it’s that they now think differently about their future.
Ravini was due to a start a master’s course in Geneva in September, but with visa procedures delayed because of the pandemic she worries she might not be able to start the course on time. That is if her course is not moved entirely online.
Greta instead was looking forward to doing internships this summer, which have all been frozen due to the pandemic. She also wanted to study in the Paris campus of her university in September, which now seems unlikely.
Liam, as a medical student and aspiring surgeon, finds this period of pandemic a fascinating, yet strange, learning experience. Still, he wonders how this crisis will affect the specializations within medicine, whether concentrations like surgery will become sidekicks to infection control and emergency services, especially as we now learn how vulnerable our world if to pandemics.
A visual archive
To bring our project to life we needed to find the right home. Instagram turned out to be just what we needed thanks to its sleek three-column layout: this allowed us to match each column to a person’s day, and each row to a specific moment in time (eg. one of the rows shows Ravini at 17:00, Greta at 13:30, and Liam at 12:30).
Moreover, it was perfect for offering both the birds-eye view and the magnifying glass qualities of any good archive. You can simply scroll through the page and travel around the day in three worlds from above, taking in the togetherness of these seemingly isolated moments.
But you can also press pause and click on a post to explore a moment in the day of Ravini, Greta or Liam, and, through it, learn curious facts about their particular lockdown experiences — from confinement rules in their respective countries and what breaking your toe in lockdown is like, to what is Liam doing in the London Tube in the middle of the coronvirus crisis and his new hygiene routine to protect his grandparents when he comes home at night.
Plus, what better medium for documenting the mundane, the weird, and the fascinating?
What’s your reality like?
Ravini, Greta and Liam are only three of a planet on lockdown. There are countless other realities of living with the virus out there. And, as the world stands still, people can finally take notice of them — and how they’re all being lived at the same time.
We are interested in extending our project to show more of these realities, and add other shared-24-hour experiences of groups of three people.
Maybe you’re volunteering in a hospital, call center, NGO or any type of civic initiative. Maybe you’re a student about to start a remote internship or a delivery worker or a parent working from home or an artist whose studio has been turned into the household common room.
Either way, we’d love to hear what your lockdown reality is like.
If you would like to become part of our project or just tells us what you think of it, drop us an email at irina.anghel@sciencespo.fr.
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This is a project created by Irina Anghel and Isabella Haberstock de Carvalho, two graduate students at the Sciences Po Journalism School in Paris.
You can follow the project on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/24honlockdown/.