The Lockdown Art Project

Lockdown is a word. Lockdown became the world. For over 3 months, we have been in varying degrees of being locked down in India (and in some places continue to be) – or on the streets, depending upon our accident of birth. People have been trying to make sense of what this means for the present and for the future in different ways, and one of the coping mechanisms seems to have been the explosion of art on the internet – old work, new work, work created specifically for these times. For children, there has been a burst of storytelling and educational sessions. Often brand-building exercises in this strange and alienating time, many of these have been about providing content for children to engage with. Some allow for children to ask questions and interact with resource people but the limitations of this space make it a one-way street, and it is up to the children and their adult care-givers to make more out of them.

Even as we are increasingly pushed to become digital consumers and the internet allows diverse voices to speak, there are still many voices that are left unheard, many experiences that find little room in the imaginations of the internet. The internet may indeed be a portal for greater democratization, but it is also a mirror of the world, replicating its inequity in virtual ways. And so, for the most, we find our corner of the world, our people, our stories. The voices of children, often marginalised in our “real” worlds, continue to be one of those on the internet too. It is expected that they will listen rather than be listened to.

The Lockdown Art Project by The Magic Key Centre for the Arts and Childhood, that ran for the 21 days of Lockdown 1.0, was a way to create room for children’s voices about this unprecedented event, emerging from a long-standing belief and practice that more space needs to be created for children to be heard. And at a time when everyone was seeking to make sense of an event like this it was important to also understand how children were perceiving it. The art project for children was a way for children to express themselves while exploring different kinds of art practice.

Each day, an exercise was posted on the social media pages of The Magic Key Centre and children had 24 hours to do it and send in their work. Anyone between the ages of 8 and 15 could participate but some enthusiastic parents helped even their 6 and 7 year olds to participate, and one grown-up also persisted in doing it. The exercises varied from writing poetry, taking photographs, recording a soundscape, shooting an interview with a grown-up and even making a puppet. The prompts were always around the lockdown, so the children got an opportunity to think about what their experience of it was like. We had some dedicated children who did all 21 days, some were late entrants and some were erratic. The participants were all from a certain class context – English-speaking, urban children with access to the internet. But, the project has kick-started an archive of children’s art around the lockdown that we hope to build upon.

Listen to the children’s voices in the video below, and you will see how we must reach wider, how we must find ways to keep the human connection alive.