"In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez describes how the town of Macondo was subject to strange phenomena, such as the overnight proliferation of rabbits that paved public spaces with small animals, or the sudden fall of leaves carpeting the streets in green within hours."
"During the pandemic, these strange phenomena were not far from human reality: animals reclaimed urban spaces during mandatory quarantines, and streets transformed into vibrant communal areas filled with greenery and public life in a short period of time."
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 transformed everyday life into a state resembling magical realism, comparable to the surreal events in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel depicts Macondo experiencing bizarre phenomena like overnight rabbit proliferation and sudden leaf falls covering streets. Similarly, during pandemic lockdowns, reality mirrored this fiction as animals reclaimed urban spaces abandoned by humans, and streets rapidly transformed into lively communal areas abundant with greenery and public activity. These parallel phenomena demonstrate how the pandemic created surreal conditions where the boundary between fictional magical realism and actual human experience blurred.
#pandemic-urban-transformation #magical-realism #animal-reclamation-of-cities #covid-19-lockdown-effects
Read at ArchDaily
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]