Corona Haikus - PhMuseum

Can we find a sense of internal freedom and external connection while in isolation? Corona Haikus is a collaborative project that uses visual poetry to document life in isolation during Corona times. It covers 10 weeks, from the 24th of March till the 10th of June 2020, in more than 30 countries.

The project was born as a response to the lockdowns that were being imposed around the globe and to the subsequent impossibility to continue daily life as it had been planned. It was a response to the shock and fear of the unknown and to the need to create a space to be together and to feel connected.

The proposition was to invite people to look at what might be gained, rather than what has been lost. It invites us to see our reality differently and to seek out what really matters to us.

It uses a visual haiku* format (3 photos and a simple text) as a mean to creatively grab the moment and allow a space of reflection and awareness.

Corona Haikus started as a Facebook group on the 24th of March and has more that one thousand active participants coming from all over the world who have shared their compositions on a daily basis, get in touch with one another and have supported each other during two months and a half, even if before they were complete strangers. The majority of contributions have come from South America and Europe though North America and Asia are also represented.

Corona Haikus now has its own website (https://coronahaikus.com/) and wants to become an archive of our Corona times, available for all, to be used for public exhibitions, debates and events throughout the world.

* A haiku is a specific type of meditative Japanese poem which has 17 syllables divided into three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. For this project we opted for a “visual haiku” format, easy to create with a mobile phone, where three photos and a text balance each other.

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Who is behind the project

Two visual haikus aficionados are behind this project. They were having so much fun creating them that they decided to share their enthusiasm for this daily practice of “re-training the eye to see”.

Sandra Tabares Duque is an international audiovisual producer of award-winning projects and films and founder of Sandelion Productions with experience in transmedia, immersive narratives and impact production. Sandra mixes up her production activities with teaching at university and doing training at international film events. She is based in Medellín, Colombia.

Sandra Gaudenzi is an internationally acknowledged authority in the field of interactive and immersive documentary practice. Coming from TV production, she has been consulting, mentoring, researching, lecturing, writing, speaking and blogging about interactive factual narratives for the last twenty years. She teaches at the University of Westminster in the UK.

Visit the website: https://coronahaikus.com/