A history of city architecture seen through the prism of care
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In 2020, at the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic, Antoine d’Agata spent months photographing the city in stasis and life on high alert in intensive care units. In this context haunted by the fear of contagion, by death that strikes at random, he explored the artistic potential of thermal photography, this technology which translates temperature contrasts into images. Three colors only, black, red, and an ocher with golden reflections, thus spread in the contours of the photographed forms burning all the visual details in their path.
Virus, the installation resulting from this work, brings together several hundred photographs in a large abstract fresco, warm like an enveloping dream, blind like a nightmare. Silhouettes with ill-defined contours are revealed when one approaches them, a ballet of wandering souls which are consumed in the night of the epidemic. Some are solitary, others linked together by gestures that evoke care. But who is the caregiver? Who is sick ? And this tenderness that emerges at the bend of a gesture, which pervades the incandescent blackness of the images as in a painting by Goya, what does it tell us about our humanity? Everyone is free to write their own script.
Rich corpus
Presented for the first time at the Brownstone Foundation, in Paris, in the fall of 2020, Virus can now be seen at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal as part of the “Support” exhibition, and that is reason enough to go there. But it is not the only one. The very political way that Agata had of representing the epidemic as having infiltrated the walls of the city, of putting all bodies on an equal footing, of making people feel in a sensitive way the part of the gift that the gestures of care conceal, resonates with the project of the curators of the exhibition, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Cynthia Fleury and the architects of the SCAU agency.
“What place does the city give to the act of care and to all of its actors – the patient, the carer and the others?they write in the foreword to their beautiful catalog. It’s about (…) to think and build the future of cities and, more generally, the future of inhabited and uninhabited spaces. Even to think about the very habitability of the world, since that is now what it is all about. » Structured by the question of the relationship between normality and the margins, the exhibition returns, from a particularly rich corpus, to the history of the establishment of healthcare institutions in the city and to that of their architecture.
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