Corona Fictions Database: Witnessing Artistic Contagion in the Digital Realm

"[I]n their chapter “Corona Fictions Database: Witnessing Artistic Contagion in the Digital Realm,” Elisabeth Hobisch, Yvonne Völkl, and Julia Obermayr note that from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial lockdown, museums and archives worldwide have made important institutional efforts to collect objects and nonfictional testimonies created or written down by individual people trying to process this global crisis. Moreover, artists have individually and collectively sought to capture the unprecedented pandemic experience through fiction. These fictional narratives, created across various media and genres, referred to as ‘Corona Fictions,’ serve as a medium of cultural memory today. As testimonies of the pandemic crisis, they originate from a specific historical context and distinct creative environment, primarily within the digital realm. The authors of the chapter show that given the transient nature of digital products, there is a significant need for archival and documentation efforts regarding Corona Fictions. They present the digital Corona Fictions Database gathering metadata, which aims to bear witness ‘in the second degree’ to the diverse fictional testimonies of the COVID-19 pandemic. This bibliographic database, focusing on Romance languages, systematically documents creative cultural responses to the ‘artistic contagion’ of the coronavirus. Thus, Hobisch, Völkl, and Obermayr present the new genre of Corona Fictions as a transmedial, transcultural, and transnational phenomenon which brings about ephemeral communities of the pandemic experience." (Sosniowska in the same volume, 215-216)