Think how many things have changed if not disrupted in this past year because of the pandemic. It’s hard to come to terms with this new normality that has been imposed on us, but which we must respect at all costs.
So just not to take ourselves too seriously, trying to analyze the situation from another point of view, the artist and designer Irina Blok has created some funny and ironic cartoons about the pandemic but specifically how it has changed our lives.

The project is titled “Covid life” and has the arduous goal of retracing some of the most common situations we’ve all found ourselves having to deal with since the beginning or almost the beginning of 2020.
In this period due to the lockdown we have discovered what are those essential things we can not do without. Among these, Irina Blok, aka “creativeblok”, has chosen two really essential ones that perfectly sum up the time that has passed from March 2020 to today.

The first could only be the toilet paper, absolute protagonist of the first months of the lockdown.
The second instead refers to today, the vaccine.

What about our routines? It is undoubtedly our habits that have changed the most, the world seems to have split in half between smartworking and distance learning, with no possible middle ground.
So, according to the Russian artist, the days become a sort of vicious circle, useless to deny it, made of more or less the same steps marked only by short trips from the sofa to the fridge to break the monotony.

Luckily, the pandemic, as this vignette shows, has also made us rediscover some sides of us that we may not have known. Those who have reinvented themselves as gardeners, those who have started training, the virus has reinvented us by making us discover hidden talents, it has made us become a little bit virologists and doctors in some cases.

In the last period, the narrative of the media has shifted to other topics as well. Variants, for example, have slowly carved out a leading role for themselves, with their worrying mutations.
By now there are so many that perhaps it is even difficult to distinguish them, but Irina always reminds us with her simple and deliberately minimalist traits how to defeat them.

But beyond work, variants and the vaccine, Irina Blok has dedicated vignettes to the “before and after”, highlighting all those situations we used to deliberately avoid but now miss. Who hasn’t had the time to decide they don’t want to go out one night, perhaps out of boredom or just not wanting a certain person. Now we are sure that this situation will not be repeated, hopefully, waiting for everything to return to normal.

In short, it is impossible to deny that our lives have drastically changed, but while we wait for the return of birthdays, the gym, dinners at restaurants and all the other things we miss, take five minutes to relive the highlights of the pandemic with absolute lightness and irony.