You most probably have been forced to stop most of the things you are used to doing. Your routines must have changed. The cinemas are closed. You can’t hit the gym.
The covid-19 pandemic has brought anxiety, fear, stress, uncertainties, and dark days to the world. Without time to prepare, we have been forced to take up a new life, different from what we are designed as humans for.
People often assume creativity thrives in conducive and enabling conditions, where the mind is free from distractions. Ironically, with people pushed to the wall and bored to the teeth due to lockdown and stay-at-home rules, unsurprisingly, for some people, these dark days have become the ground for creativity, bringing sparks of light in a dark tunnel.
The lockdown in India forced Partha Saha, who’s a father and mechanic, into being creative. Partha usually rides his daughter to school on a bike. Wondering how he would take his daughter to school on his bike and still maintain social distancing when school finally reopens, Partha conceived a brilliant idea. He used his existing technical skills to create an extension on his bike, allowing him to ride with his daughter while maintaining a distance of a meter away from her.
The Ikorodu Bois, a group of three teenage Nigerian boys are known for re-enacting movie trailers with household objects. The pandemic and its troubles didn’t stop these young creative lads, rather, they turned up with more creativity. They took their creativity to another level in June 2020, after they recreated “Extraction”, an American action-thriller film released on Netflix in April 2020. All scenes were made completely from household objects. The revamped video has over 11 million views on Twitter.
With a shortage of N95 masks, health workers around the world have been faced with difficult times. In Florida, a group of volunteers are making thousands of nose masks from an unusual source. The fabric typically used in covering sterilizers found in every hospital were usually disposed of as waste. These fabrics are now the new source for making nose masks for health workers, to ensure they are safe as they battle the pandemic from the front-line.
Around the world, the pandemic has opened up new doors of possibilities. Somewhere, robots are delivering food to the needy. Dogs are being used as wine delivery agents. Nose masks are being created from used milk cartons. Supermarkets are installing hands-free door handles.
With most people confined to restricted routines, there has been a spark of creativity around the world, beyond the creative industry. Mothers, fathers, teachers, entrepreneurs, caregivers are all being forced to find a way to fit into the ‘new normal’. Necessity they say is the mother of invention.
Toritseju Omagbemi
Digital Content Coordinator