The Virus Diaries Launch

Exhibit no.1: Inmate Calendar (image creator: Rodanthi Tzanelli)

From the beginning of April, we bring to you a unique boxset of calamitous recordings to keep your spirit agile and (hopefully) your abs toned. As we go through one of the most unusual évènements in modern global history, Rodanthi is reporting on social and cultural phenomena that the enforced COVID-19 curfew generates or brings to the fore. Not to brag, but Rodanthi is also the first reporter who goes nowhere and (scarcely, if at all) interacts with none at a distance less than two meters (indeed, more recently, she stopped going out and if she does, she shouts at careless idiots). In the Nietzschean tradition, she treats such consumers and dog-walkers as subjects, who may say or do things that she can milk for ideas in her digital travails. Educated in the renown academy of homemaking cons, Rodanthi will introduce you to alternative ways of writing and thinking about a world crisis that you may be too embarrassed to laugh at (but hopefully, 'laughing at' makes you think critically about).

In a critical dialogue with C.W. Mills’ Sociological Imagination, which advocates the connection of the autobiographical to the collective, The Virus Diaries ‘gestures towards’ the way the politics and poetics of intimacy, secrecy and even silence generate records of changing mores or encourage regression to older practices and habits among human communities. Treating ‘The Virus’ as a non-human conductor of symbolic movements towards such habits and practices, Rodanthi discusses the ignominies of human nature from a here humorous, there serious or tragic perspective.

Screenwriter: Rodanthi Tzanelli
Credits: Rodanthi & anyone who happens to be passing by the home screen or the street (at a 2 meters’ distance)
Producers: Northern Notes Blog Editors (with featuring Chief Editor Rodanthi Tzanelli), Sociology & Social Policy (University of Leeds)