Entertainment Week - Ellie escapes from the lockdown jam through art and gardening

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Edited BY


G P Kennedy


Ellie - Milan, Italy

 

At the beginning of the lockdown, we all switched both to an intensive search for entertainment and to a digital experience equivalent to everything. Naturally, these converged to digital entertainment. It was the biggest one for me, too, whether taking advantage of the many movie streaming options that suddenly became available, like these super cool Georgian movies http://georgiatoday.ge/news/20222/Georgian-Filmmakers-Release-Their-Films-Online-for-Free or, of course, all the museum and gallery tours that were available online. I especially loved the Getty Museum digital presence. In addition, zoom happy hours with friends. online talks and similar opened doors to a deluge of fun that could now be more expansive and geographically unmoored because of the pandemic.

 

However, not only did it become old very quickly but it also made me be deeper entrenched in my perspective of un-digitality. You see, I consider my work my art and my everyday experience a protest, or at least an objection against the digital. I believe we need to make it a point to experience the non-digital, like a sort of mindfulness or physical exercise that we make a point in integrating into our lives. Do I avoid the digital? I guess I have it in my life as much as most everybody. But I am thinking about, enjoying, reaching for the non-digital. And most people started doing that, in appreciating the physical more. Like breaking the law to walk in their own neighborhood. Renting neighbors' dogs so that they'd be allowed to simply walk around.

 

Right when physical exercise outside was allowed in Lombardy, I took to my bike and went on longer bike tours than I had ever done before.

 








As an artist, I am very much aware that art-making became entertainment not just for the purpose of "self-care", but a favorite pastime for many who would not consider themselves artists. This did not bother me since, again, I advocate for a hands-on lifestyle for everybody and for access to art - including art-making - as a sort of critical thinking that should be at the disposal of all, just like writing, for example.


So of course, while I did have the chance to work on my art more, it made me more fully aware of its haptic qualities. I am an activist for hapticism, if you wish, and made haptic art after the lockdown.

 










Museums were slower to reopen than other institutions and businesses. But because I wanted to support them, I tried to make it a point that actual presence, a visit, was better than a digital tour.


While the digital is here to stay, I believe that an emphasis on it for museums will lead to the same place that digitalization brought to newspapers.

 







And finally, plants! Isn't gardening the best combination of hapticism, art, and appreciation of life? I started a lot of new plants during the lockdown and have grown my indoor garden to a threatening extent.

How do you entertain yourself in this second-wave era?



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