The Lockdown Diaries was a multi-part project during which a select group of volunteer participants from the Bard College Berlin (BCB) community explored in a series of podcasts how they themselves and Berliners more generally were experiencing, remembering, and engaging with the locked-down cultural institutions in Berlin and their alternate digital offerings in Spring 2021.

In early February 2021, Ramona Mosse put out an open call to the BCB community and selected 6 participants, each willing to attend three different cultural events in Berlin (digitally and, when possible again, in person) over the course of the Spring Semester and record short audio diary entries in response (ranging from personal reflections to interviews with performers, other attendees, audiences or cultural practitioners), to participate in the Lockdown Diary Podcast Series. In an initial meeting on February 19, 2021, participants presented their cultural event interests and their experience with and goals for this podcast.

All the participants also completed the EHCN-funded “How to Make a Podcast” workshop with Reece Cox, which expanded their technical skills and allowed them to create initial short audio segments. The diaries were then put together into a podcast series that documents this specific cultural moment and explores how Berlin culture has changed through this digital shift.

At the end of the semester, a live public podcast event with excerpts from the podcast series took place at BCB’s art space, inviting the wider community/neighborhood to listen in on these diaries.

Organized by Ramona Mosse, Bard College Berlin Professor of Theater and Performance

Student podcasts by Miksa Gáspár, Maria José Sarmiento Isaac, Naama Simon, Shreya Shukla, Evelyn Weiss