Guest AuthorQuarantine Diary is a web-based diary project by Hungarian visual artist Fanni Papp. She is currently studying at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, primarily creating in the field of photography among other types of media. She is mainly interested in feminism, witchcraft, and contemporary spirituality.
Her words on her project
“The original concept was to take a self-portrait every day during the quarantine period, which quickly turned into a quite inconsistent process due to the circumstances. I ended up taking as many self-portraits as I could, whenever I had the motivation or inspiration… or a ‘great idea’. Eventually, I assembled the photos into a website which I coded myself (with some help from others). The site looks like a calendar one can browse, with clickable icons for each day. When you click on an icon, a diary-entry-looking window pops up with texts from me – my thoughts and reflections during quarantine, dreams, or sometimes quotes and recommendations.
During this process, I reflected a lot on the ideas, ideals, and pressure we constantly get confronted with when using social media – specifically speaking of the recent wave of influencers promoting positive thinking, people or accounts suggesting or strictly telling us ways to handle certain situations, how we should go through them, and what we should be doing. For example when we need to stay home due to a pandemic when all this is so much more exaggerated.
I decided to incorporate my feelings of anxiety related to this in the form of so-called motivational, inspirational quotes for days when I didn’t feel up to the ‘task’ of taking a self-portrait. I used hashtags and created gifs to try and somehow conform to these internet phenomena. As a conclusion, I would say setting up extra or new expectations to ourselves in times of crisis is tricky. Personally, I learned a lot about myself through journaling, I very much recommend it. I also learned to be more forgiving with myself while still slowly, step-by-step, getting shit done. All the rest is there in the details.”