Lockdown Work

SARS-cov2, a 125 nanometer diameter virus, has precipitated our modern societies into an unprecedented crisis. Scales give rise to smiles.
It had revealed the injustices and weaknesses of our time. It is one of the consequences of our lifestyles, of our mistreatment on biodiversity and the living world.

In Monségur, south-west of France, locked down from March 17 to May 11, after fifteen days being dazed, on a day to day basis I was reading French and international press medias in their digital versions, some accessible scientific publications, some blogs and books. Reading was my only bulwark against intoxication by social media and 24 hour news channels that make you feel sick. These readings, were for me a way to understand what we were going through and to think about the future - a future that must necessarily take into account the unprecedented crisis that the world is going through.

Maybe Another remedy would have been to photograph my daily life, my cup of coffee with the beautiful light of the emerging spring, the fine feet of my sleeping daughter sticking out from her quilt, the facades of the houses opposite from my window, my shadow over the bedroom wall, a grazing back-light on an unmade bed... At the beginning of April, once my daughter left, alone facing solitude, I could also have photographed the inhabitants of Monségur cloistered behind their windows. But social medias were exploding with that new quarantine experience...
Far from Paris, I couldn't photograph the deserted, sleepy and silent city. Anyway, it didn't matter, these landscapes were familiar to me for having imagined and created them in 2012 in the making of my Darkened Cities.

So I opened long time closed drawers, in which I found Electron microscopy glass plates images of the leprosy bacillus from the late 1970s. Such a treasure.
They were given to me when I was 13, by a Italian microbiologist, one of my father's colleague. Looking at these invisible territories to the naked eye, it was difficult to say whether they were organic or mineral matter. One can imagine the surface of Mars, another planet, or the detail of a rock, captured in macro photography. I scanned them. The extraordinary black and white quality of these photographs contrasted with the colorized images of SARS-Cov2 swamping the Internet.

Leprosy, a plague which was to put thousands of humans in forced quarantine isolating them from the rest of their peers. The power of some, over others. The Bio-power which Michel Foucault mentions, which exerted on the life of the bodies, and that of the populations..

Driven by these thoughts I then remembered another long closed drawer that contained another treasure borrowed from best friends over now a year ago, 19 Neolithic arrowheads!

My daily life during this Covid-19 parenthesis, in addition to reading, was to take close photographs of these weapons shaped, sculpted, chiseled by humans who, having become sedentary more than 4.000 years ago, probably suffered the first fatal and devastating epidemics, decimating the earliest centers of population.

The Neolithic is characterized by a very high demographic concentration but also by an unprecedented concentration of domestic animals conducive to "zoonoses". "The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminths, and viruses that fed on them." writes James C. Scott in Against the grain.

These arrowheads testify to the beginning of a radical change in our behavior with nature, which lead to its exploitation and its progressive and massive destruction.

This work contextualized during lockdown, is based on associations, and questions our lifestyle, that is entirely heading towards consumption, short-term profits, and its toxic effects on our bodies, and our futures. It also rises doubts about the power of states and its representatives.
It also questions our devastating relationship with nature, where species that don't have to, end up, because we are destroying what separated them from each other.

For each arrowhead photograph which is a stack of 25 different digital shots - so that the focus is precise over its entire surface - I have combined an excerpt from an article or text, with a mention of its date of publication or reading, typed with OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces. This established connection is a trace of this period of my particular confinement. It is echoing an almost global lockdown, a direct consequence of the health, economic and social crisis caused by the SARS-Cov2 virus outbreak, an unthinkable event actually created by another much more dangerous virus, Man...

Thierry Cohen, Monségur, June 2020