Psychodémie

Psychodemié' is a visual document highlighting the human vulnerability revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Completed in Brazil in February 2022, this large 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. It questions the global social and political dynamics in the context of the pandemic under 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. It questions also global economic and political dynamics through a health crisis that has revealed the fragility and responsibility of all. It is in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this fatality of 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."