Collectarium lockdown space: sharing viral domestic transformations

The collaborative research project, Collectarium Lockdown Space began during the Covid pandemic in 2021. At this time, we had to radically alter the way we lived to protect ourselves from this life-threatening virus. For so many at this time, public and private space was collapsed into that of the home, with quotidian domestic space under intense pressure to also become space for people to work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape. The project was devised to collect and record this significant shift in the demands placed on domestic space. Collectarium (Allyson Waller and Sophie Beard) with Peter Maloney used Instagram to invite people to submit posts to show how they had adapted, transformed and expanded their domestic environment during this time to meet their individual and collective everyday needs. This paper and presentation will evidence specific examples of the innovative spatial transformations and behavioural adaptations that took place through the submitted Instagram posts. It will show how, for many, the home simultaneously functioned as the office, the gym, the school, the artists’ and designer’s studio, the pub, the club, the campsite, the restaurant, the beach and spaces of the imaginary as well as the more traditional space of privacy and security. We will discuss how subsequent analysis of the collection revealed new typologies of domestic ritual and spatial design during this time. Despite the fear, anxiety and despair that accompany the memory of this time for so many, the collection will reveal the positive, determined and joyful approaches taken to survive and thrive through urgent adaptations to our domestic space. We will speculate how these have begun to shape the demands of our future domestic space. We will show how examples from the collection were reactivated and re-imagined as site-specific participatory installations for the Now Play This festival in 2024 which explored liminality and play at Somerset House, London and we will preview the forthcoming publication.