Exemplaire Signé / Signed Copy.
1st edition of 700 copies in French and 600 copies in English (Version française ici).
These photographs were exhibited at the Mucem, Centre de conservation et de ressources in Marseille (France) from Friday, December 10, 2021 to Friday, March 25, 2022.
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 mainly of thermal images taken in hospital resuscitation services, refugee centres and public spaces uninhabited in France during the lockdown months of March to June 2020.
PSYCHODEMIA questions social dynamics, economic and global policies in the context of the pandemic under the incandescent backdrop of a city confined to hospitals where nurses and patients carrying the virus apply a daily ritual of acts of life and death. Antoine d’Agata transforms these opaque spaces into a shadow theatre. It 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 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 unprecedented gestures of resistance that transfigure bodies. The thermal image freezes the forms, the postures, the figures in forms imperceptible to the naked eye.
For thirty years, Antoine d’Agata has been showing the contemporary conditions of a humanity that has been badly beaten. He questions the limits of the photographic process, does not consider society as a whole to document it, but immerses himself in the violence of the world at its own risk. Her images are subjective gestures that aim to move the boundaries of visual representation beyond 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 of Araujo.
