Art in the time of Coronavirus: Children in Italy turn to art to cope with quarantine

"Andrà tutto bene" means "everything will be fine" in Italian. This is the message children of Italy have adopted as they use art to cope with the quarantine and spread messages of hope and positivity.

The Italian government has imposed a nationwide lockdown in an effort to tackle the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak outside of China. Movements in and out of cities are severely restricted. But, this is not stopping Italians from using art and creativity to tackle the situation.

Tweep @arieldivit posted: "'Andrà tutto bene' accompanied by the [rainbow] symbol 🌈 is a slogan launched by Italian children to face this difficult moment that Italy is going through. We are all locked up at home, in quarantine, we cannot talk to people so outside the windows we put banners to send positive messages."

Art also helps tackle the boredom of not haing much to do when everyone is stuck at home. Twitter user @margie_hathaway shared artwork that her daughters made during the quarantine.

Other artists are also taking to street art and grafitti to share messages about staying home to be safe. And, the hashtag #quarantineart became popular over the last one week.

The scientific link between boredom and creativity

Research suggests that people who want to come up with creative ideas do well when they let their minds drift. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that bored people “are more likely to engage in sensation seeking”—that is, to look for activities or sights that engage their minds and stimulate the brain’s reward centers. These people are more prone to “divergent thinking styles” or the ability to come up with creative new ideas. So, boredom may encourage people to approach rewards and spark associative thought.”

In another study, researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, they set out to test the link between boredom and creativity. They asked 80 participants to perform boring tasks like copying and reading numbers from a phone book and then to drum up as many possible uses for plastic cups as they could. The groups that completed the boring phone book tasks beforehand came up with more creative answers than the control group that had not.

Boredom, apparently, inspires “lateral thinking”—a form of engaging your mind to seek a more creative solution to the problem at hand because the obvious one is just not very interesting.