Your room expands to a limitless space field with a Colosseum-like museum on the horizon. You hear DJ sets playing, and art works fly in the air without any support. We hope that each one of you has already managed to adapt to a peculiar cyberpunk of today life, and online museum visits have become an ordinary thing over a cup of tea. If not yet, then it’s time to plug in. We’ll tell you about the Covid Room project — which will turn your stay at home 360 degrees.
Welcome to Covid Room, a virtual room where techno, house and indie music plays, and the interior is decorated by digital artists’ works. Young people from Italy and Russia decided to defeat the virus of quarantine boredom by creating a virtual museum and an online music and art platform, that connects artists and brings people together around the world. In addition, it is also a brand new format for the Russian audience — E-CLUBBING, and the music is provided by the DJs, who, as the project’s creators say, “volunteered to play for us”.
It seems that online art projects that are now evolving were able to completely refute the popular belief that in critical moments of crises or epidemics, society no longer needs art. The artists, left without exhibitions and sales, need such initiatives now more than ever. A Covid Room founder Andrea Parialò thinks that during these critical moments it might be true that the demand falls but it’s definitely the opposite for the supply.
“Artists, — he continues, — known to have a more sensible soul, will feel the need to express themselves more during such a period. It’s easy to see that right now, it will be cool to see how many new movements will be born, when looking back. The Internet helps a lot with the spread of art, something that wasn’t there back in the past world crisis. Yes, the main idea is to create a relief valve channel for artists and an entertainment platform for people for fighting quarantine’s boredom”.
Covid Room has a constant open call on Instagram and recruits musicians and visual artists of completely different styles and genres. At the same time, the whole platform is run on pure enthusiasm. “We’re all students or just graduated, we don’t have a single penny to invest”, — Andrea says. “But we’re specialized on a lot of different things, so we manage to cover every aspect of this project”.
On March 27, Covid Room held the first online party and, according to the best traditions of quarantine, it took place in a group conference in Zoom. Webcams created a collective mosaic that all people became a part of. They could see each other and interact with each other — dancing to the rhythm of the same music. None of the organizers could think that it would have been possible to gather such a number of people in just two weeks. “Definitely keeping the project alive, everyone has been so lovely,” — they say with confidence.
And what will happen to online projects after the quarantine? Do they have enough ideas and enthusiasm to continue existing, and, if so, what will the format be?
“The platform will definitely continue”, — Andrea says. “We don’t know exactly what the strategy will be with the name, we don’t know yet if we create a collective or just stick to the Covid Room project itself now that it has a clear identity.
For the future after the isolation of course online parties won’t have much public but we’re already thinking of some cool ideas to take Covid Room in the real world without losing the concept behind. It will be cool but for that we will definitely need to have some help by some sponsor cause the project we would like to realize is huge”.
The next Covid Room online party will take place on April 4. Stay tuned for Instagram and Facebook, wash your hands and don’t forget to smile. Indeed, the ability not to lose heart in difficult circumstances is also an art!
Author: Zlata Liman
Translators: Irina Klimova, Giulia Perin
