Psychodémie

Description

PSYCHODEMIA is a visual document highlighting the human vulnerability revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Completed, in Brazil in February 2022, the 520-page book consists primarily of thermal images taken in hospital intensive care units, refugee centers, and uninhabited public spaces in France during the months of containment from March to June 2020.
PSYCHODEMIA questions the social, economic and global political dynamics of the pandemic in the incandescent setting of a city confined to hospitals where nurses and patients carrying the virus perform a daily ritual of life and death gestures. Antoine d'Agata transforms these opaque spaces into a theater of shadows. He erases the very surface of things, the skin of beings and the skin of the world, to better reveal its tragic dimension.
This health crisis has revealed the fragility and the responsibility of all. It is in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this fatality of the social and physiological death, that the photographer tried to apprehend, elaborating and affirming, through the photographic language, the possibility and of new gestures of resistance which transfigure the bodies. The thermal image freezes the forms, the postures, the figures in forms imperceptible to the naked eye.
For the past thirty years, Antoine d'Agata has been showing the contemporary conditions of a battered humanity. He questions the limits of the photographic process, does not consider society as a whole in order to document it, but immerses himself in the violence of the world at his peril. His images are subjective gestures that aim to displace the boundaries of visual representation outside the ordinary conventions of photography; this project was supported by the MuCEM and the Jan Michalski Foundation, texts by Sandra Laugier, Michel Agier, Fred Ritchin, Math de Araujo.