Creativity and Confinement
Ricardo Sacadura was a jeKnowledge’s communication collaborator since 2018, and throughout his career path he was constantly working on the creative and intelligent construction of the image that supported the communication of our projects. He is passionate about design and works constantly to improve his work, skill set, and learn new things.
A couple of weeks ago, the jeKmagazine team asked me if I was interested in writing an article for the new issue. I spent the following days trying to understand what type of meaningful content I could bring to this next edition. It proved to be a hard and apparently impossible task, since everyone else, including me, was stuck at home due to the pandemic, and my ability to create and imagination was limited to four walls, completely frozen. Suddenly I felt that, given the situation, anything I could write was in danger of having a superficial, expendable, and merely speculative tone. Nothing could flourish as an idea or reflection without being based on concrete experiences that deserved my attention, and those experiences were scarce (not to say non-existent), the days were filled with remote classes, project meetings, and, in my case, an overdose of literature and cinema.
In the meantime, the days passed for weeks, and during my browsing the web, I started to detect a certain flow of very original projects, ideas, and narratives that were being uploaded online. The most curious thing about this phenomenon was that many times people were keeping the premise and only changing the process (and consequently the final result). In other words, people were presenting new solutions to existing problems. They were giving a new look, a 180-degree rotation. In my point of view, this was very rich and worthy of reflection. The transition of the confinement as a limiter of expression to a creative tool started becoming more and more notorious and ended up inspiring this article.
On a personal level, this change of paradigm proved to be very enlightening and showed me that this period might not be at all lost, that I could extract something out of this, like creating new projects and working on ideas, mainly in my area (Design and Multimedia), where I deal with the concept of creativity in a daily basis.
Turning to the concrete analysis of this theme, and doing justice to the title of the text, I think there are two or three things to say about this phenomenon. At the beginning of April, we started receiving in our feeds a gigantic diversity of announcements of talks, conferences, and cycles of remote conversations. Companies and organizations did not want to give up, and (mainly in the culture and science fields), most of the events continued. These online forums allowed a wider audience and, on the other hand, the involvement of several distinguished people who, in a face-to-face context, would be reluctant to appear due to a full schedule. What I mean is that, if we look in the right way, the number of positive aspects that came out of this pandemic surpassed the expectations. The events were not replaced, they were done differently, and this allowed the entities to understand the potential of the web, and to recognize it as the effective device of communication that it is. Even the content of these events went through a metamorphosis. The speeches seemed to be more transparent and less rehearsed, and the critical spirit often improvised by some speakers, took us to deeper and less explored places on the topics covered.
As soon as the conferences started, another movement started to emerge. Several artists, galleries, and festivals began to create and democratize their works. From one day to the other, everyone had access to hundreds of long and short films online that tried to fight the boredom of anyone who was in quarantine. Some never-before-seen projects were uploaded (as is the case with David Lynch Theater on YouTube), and now, with a more open and available audience to enjoy them all. Several video clips, posters, and animations were produced, with innovative technologies, under the weight of the pandemic, and, therefore, with an unusual freshness. (I apologize for making the text more cultural, but it was the area that stood out in this theme and that is more familiar to me)
If we take a look at history, we rapidly realize that this phenomenon is not that curious. After all, this change of paradigm was expected. We can not forget that shortly after the Second World War, which devastated Europe in several ways, many movements emerged, specifically Postmodernism, which came to structure society in art and science in ways never seen before. Using the Portuguese case as an example, we can see that right after the 1755 earthquake, the city of Lisbon went from chaotic and disorderly to a visionary and rejuvenated Lisbon.
The truth is that human beings need radical changes in their experiences and contexts. Changes that make them look at the world and life in different ways, and I think that there is no reason to contradict these processes. Instead, we must embrace them and question the future with the ambition to be able to become powerful players.
I risk going further in this reflection and concluding the article(which is already long), saying that if we are effectively aware that these extraordinary times affect our creativity, we cannot deny that the common element in these moments of history is the change. If we know that change has this rejuvenating power in man, why don’t we intentionally provoke little changes in our daily routine that lead us to have a different perception of things? Why not turn the cube upside down and try to see what we can get out of it? The next pandemic might be a lifetime away. Are we willing to wait this long to create more and better?
Ricardo Sacadura.
June 12, 2020
