Due to the mandated lockdown a few weeks ago, the Bhaktivedanta Academy (BANA) in Alachua, Florida, USA has moved all its classes online. Besides continuing with their academic curriculum, the students from age 3-16 participate at a special school-wide collective art project, called the Artistic Time Capsule. 

A page from Vanamali Zaldivar’s (13) COVID-19 Time Capsule Diary

The project’s coordinator Krishna Lila Dasi (Krisztina Danka, Ph.D.) filmmaker and BANA Visual Arts teacher explained that by giving them exciting creative challenges, the purpose of this project is to help children and their families cope with the emotional toll the social isolation, the anxiety and the uncertainties create. “Most children express their thoughts and feelings better through different forms of arts, than words. Art has healing power,” she says. 

“Social distancing” a photo by Vanamali Zaldivar (13) 

The Artistic Time Capsule is based on a common understanding that we are living through a historic time now, and with the impact of the coronavirus, nobody’s life is the same as it used to before. To remember all this in the future, for the past few weeks, BANA students have been recording their thoughts and feelings in a special “COVID-19 Time Capsule Diary”, drawing pictures of their activities, taking photos, videos, writing essays, poems, messages as well as letters to their future selves.  

‘Trapped in qarantine’ – a self-portrait by Santosh Giotti (13)

At the end of the lockdown, every art project and diary will be collected, put in a sealed container and buried in the school yard.  

And ten years from now, all the students will be invited to a special school reunion where the he container will be dug up and opened, then they all be celebrating the finding of the “lost treasure.”

Photo by Veda Rajesh (13)

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Any family, school or community interested in doing their own time capsule project a template (English, Spanish and French) could be downloaded from the following link. Adult template version is also available: https://letsembark.ca/time-capsule?fbclid=IwAR1_Ud0J38monOlynfBL_-7ha46wdX2Chu1Vipv4po_bhrsRdNXPdDzzSc8