Quarantine Chronicles: Home Alone Survival Guide
For me, it’s Quarantine Day 16, and Max Siedentopf’s Home Alone: A Survival Guide is getting me through the day. His satirical photo-essay tackles the struggles of vibrant creatives in quarantine – what is there to do? His photos, which are a collection of comical interpretations of wacky “survival guide” instructions, truly tickle me. As I let out a loud, guttural laugh, I realize how quiet my room had been.
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
As shelter-in-place induced anxiety can come in waves, there are moments where one can’t help but feel that being confined indoors is nothing but a limitation. Even as artists realize that there is still an online audience to perform for, we forget how poorly designed our infrastructure is for supporting artists, as well as the immense pressure artists have to “create.”
Even with the rise in independent artists embracing the DIY mindset, implementing their craft over live-stream, I’ve read countless newspaper articles and magazine headlines bemoaning the laziness of the millennial generation, the self-obsession of Gen-Z, and countless other chastising remarks about the lack of production during Corona-era quarantines. “During the Bubonic Plague, Shakespeare wrote three of his greatest tragedies while Isaac Newton germinated his theory of gravity. You can surely get off the couch!” Well bah-humbug, what an intimidating attempt to spark productivity and embolden a vulnerable population of unsettled and fearful citizens, most of whom are watching life as-they-know-it dissipate, many of them anguished as their loved ones and close friends battle illness, while they must simultaneously deal with their financial and emotional crises.
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
The beauty that radiates from this project, Home Alone Survival Guide, is the pocket of lightness and tenderness he has found in a blanket of shadows. This project is more than a humorous distraction, but a “how-to” for having fun with what you have. He’s not taking you down the scenic roads of Hampton’s recluse for the privileged few. He’s not on the frontlines with doctors and nurses, who are in the midst of a wartime effort to battle an impending enemy. Clip your nails and arrange them into a star. Collect all the dust and make a new animal. Build an apocalypse shelter. Wear all your books as a hat. Create a bloody horror scene using ketchup.
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
The humor and creativity using ordinary props you’d find in your bedroom and other mundane interior spaces, redefines space and object, form and function. He places much-needed goggles on your eyes, turning any bedroom into a playground of the mind.
“Even confined in your four walls, there are so many opportunities to create new and exciting work and turn this into something positive,” Siedentopf says on his website. “Together with everyone around the world that’s stuck at home I created a survival guide of being home alone. Each day I released a series of instructions for things you can do while you're stuck at home.”
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
Max’s work is playful, and ultimately, extends a hand to you, to do the same.
I recently adopted a puppy – a wiggly, tail-thumping boxer – who is on a mission to smush his nose on every square inch of my house. He explores my backyard with ravenous curiosity, earnestly pausing at each life pile and twig, to see just “what’s up” with it all. His gleeful amusement at the birds that twitter and thrash around our feeder was a two hour-long activity. Watching him explore with intrepid and hysterical excitement the space I’ve inhabited for years has given me a new perspective. As I bird-watched with him today, we spotted two cardinals, a blue jay, countless wrens and finches. Squirrels chattered nearby. A red-tailed hawk flew overhead. I think Sidentopf accomplishes something similar in tribute to our cloistered environment.
Put on your imagination goggles – and take a look in your fridge. You might just find a new contour kit. Or at least an activity for this Tuesday evening.
Home Alone Survival Guide – © Max Siedentopf
You can view more of Max Siedentopf’s work here.
Max Siedentopf (1991) is a Namibian-German visual artist who works with video, photography, creative direction, and “everything in-between.” Given his eclectic influences – he grew up in Windhoek, Namibia and has worked in Berlin, Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam – Siedentopf’s style depicts a rich background of varying influences.
