The Quarantine Zine

I follow an Instagram account @nicezines and they shared a page from this magazine @qtinezine and so I looked into the Instagram page and fell in love with the idea behind it. The Quarantine Zine is a collaborative effort to create a community of creatives and allow people to express their thoughts, feelings and frustrations surrounding being in quarantine. I wanted to share with you some of my favourite pages from the zine.

The first is this page 'My daily recipe for the quarantine fifteen' which shows a daily routine which is basically how most of us are living currently, rolling out of bed late, eating lots of food and watching TV. It shows to us that we are allowed to do these things at the minute, we're allowed to be lazy and everyone else is doing it to. It looks like your average time line but with the illustrations it looks so much more fun and interesting to look at, has a sense of playfulness and childlike behaviour which is basically how we living our lives currently.

The next is a page 'A quarantine activity book', it asks you a series of very odd questions but really gets your brain working and imagining, its a great way to trigger creativity and wake up your brain and allows you to set free and draw whatever you like on the page.

I love this next page which is a copy of a page from Alice in Wonderland which is based in a very abstract and unreal world, much like the one we are living in currently so we can really relate to Alices feeling of confusion and loss, so its a very appropriate book to use. The artist has blacked out segments of the sentences to create a new story and I think this is a really creative a new way of telling a story.

This page is one I really relate to 'Somedays I feel like doing everything, some days I feel like doing nothing'. With the image of one animal laying on the ground doing nothing and another with 4 arms and 3 legs doing many things such as exercise, art and reading, I feel it is the perfect image to represent the two ends of how you can feel each day. It is a great way to ensure people know that everyone has their good and bad days and that it's ok to be like this.

The next is a comparison of Social distancing and Social Justice, asking us how we restricting and damaging confinement is for us, how we are doing time. They ask us to compare to how we are 'reforming' in prisons, do we still think this is appropriate now we have all experienced how it feels to be closed away.

The next page is quite retro and old school with the old TV buffering page saying 'Stay home' and Tom the cat placed in front of a hypnotising background asking the question 'Are you still watching'? This is how we all feel with the constant repetition of 'Stay Home' and how we are having it drilled into us all day everyday.

This page asking 'Do you ever question the nature of your reality?' with the pill bottle labelled 'quarantine isolation'. It's giving us that moment to really think about what is happening currently and we should question our current reality as it's so unlike anything we have ever known and it makes us feel slightly crazy and we made need medicinal help.

The next one I really love its trying to inspire us, even though we are isolated we should use this time to reinvent ourselves and make those changes we have always wanted to. It's giving us a chance to really expand and stay connected and explore our creativity. It is important to look for the bright side of this hard situation and make the most out of what we have because theres no changing it, only embracing it.

The next page is based on our online meetings, nearly everyone has experienced these, whether it's for work, school, university or friends and family communication, we are all living on online meetings. They use imagery of things we are all very used to seeing with the camera and notifications, it's very relatable to everyone at this time.

This next page is about the self debate you have with yourself, where you decide whats really most important to you and theres a clear message at the end of it that basically the most important thing we should be doing and the winner of our debates is that we should be staying home and keeping people safe, not going out when it isn't a necessity. They do this in a way that we can relate to and so we know how if we were in this situation how it should end.

The next is about being 'Close enough', the first page filled with photos of parties and gatherings with friends and family and the next of groups of people on Zoom calls, the new social interactions. It shows the comparison of how we used to be together and how we communicate during this time. It highlights that for the time being this is as 'close enough' to spending time with our friends as we're going to get.

And the final page is one I really liked as probably the thing I miss most and what I am most upset about during this time is not being able to travel, so this page is dedicated to helping you travel in isolation. It gives you five great ways for you to either re live past holidays by scrapbooking or planning future trips with bucket lists, its a great way to look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel and also a great way to spend all of your current free time when you may not have been able to do these things if we carried on 'normally'.