Perturbante e performante. Il lockdown indomestico

Italy, the first European country that started the lockdown due to Covid-19, today is – still – in the midst of a mass biographical (or else, societal) disruption. Our everyday life has been completely overturned. During the first phase of the pandemic (March/April 2020) we con- ducted 20 episodic narrative interviews with childless, highly educated adults (11 females and 9 males, 29 to 36 years old) living in Northern Italy, the epicentre of the epidemic, to explore how residents reconstructed their everyday life. Interviewees report mixed feelings about stay- ing locked in their homes: cozyness but also restriction; easiness to call friends but forced physical isolation; doing work in places usually devoted to relax. Moreover, being forced to stay at home appears as a cognitive ambiguous situation in which people define themselves as persons ‘in-waiting’ in a ‘hold-on’ time. With COVID-19, something (very) familiar like everyday life became suddenly hostile and incomprehensible. We underwent a social disrup- tion requiring new cognitive categories, new social practices and new habits. Our experience of the domestic sphere turned ambivalent.