PSYCHODEMIC

Sensitive knowledge: this is one of the possible definitions of aesthetics. A kind of direct thought, or even a kind of idea that is born in connection with sensory stimuli and the concrete world. A way of understanding our experiences and experiences, but through colors, shapes, textures, sounds, movements and their countless interrelationships and compositions. Something that perhaps participates, like a floor, in the definitions, qualifications, categories and arguments of abstract thought and verbal communication. Like when we are faced with an important problem or decision and we need to walk, see a sunset, listen to or play music, doodling a drawing.

Or even when we are faced with something deeply disconcerting, like a pandemic. It was in this way, through sensations, images and their evocations, that Antoine d’Agata set out to reflect on what we have not been able to fully embrace until now, in these more than two years of the global health crisis. Reflection, rumination, visitation, contact, recurrence, diving, witnessing, face to face – these are terms that, in a way, oppose representation. Antoine did not seek to represent the pandemic, he did not make it a subject, nor did he want to illustrate or portray the pain and horror we were experiencing, because that would already be a second thing, it would already presuppose a previous knowledge. And we didn’t know. Instead, he put himself in direct and daily contact with what was happening around him and with himself, whether on the streets that were emptying or inside hospitals, whether in France or in other countries he passed through, including Brazil, in São Paulo. and in Rio de Janeiro. Testimony images, which recur, with the force of a survivor’s diary, which give us back, in the form of this sensitive knowledge, something that we all live but have not yet named. And that we have the chance, through these same images that blend into our memory, to face, to inquire, to evoke whatever it is in us. To be revisited, no doubt, but with the useful distance that a work offers to those who approach it.

It remains to speak of the nature of these images, the result of the procedure that Antoine chose and supported along the way, thermography. With the exception of some conventional images taken at the first moment of the crisis, it was with a thermal sensor attached to the cell phone that all the work was done. Antoine often emphasizes that for thermography it is not the light that matters, but the heat sources, like a body, like the life of a being. Hence the silhouettes, because it is not the light on the surface of things and therefore their external appearance that this technique captures, but the form of the heat they generate – luminous patches of warm colors, such as orange, red and yellow. Or the form of its absence in the coldest colors, such as blue, violet and, in the extreme, the shadow, no color at all. It goes without saying how eloquent this can be when the life of a body ceases.

It is also through the thermography procedure and the particular way in which the photographer knew how to use it that the images in this series are often compared to painting. Even more so when knowing that it is a recognized part of Antoine’s repertoire, something that one of his more recent books, for example, a selection of his photographs alongside works by Francis Bacon, demonstrates very well. But it is important to emphasize here the indexical character – one of the specificities of photography –, a quality that thermography also shares: something was actually in front of the camera, a part of the concrete world impressed the sensor. They are people, therefore, they are patients, the medical and nursing teams, their gestures of care, they are individuals on the streets, they are frightened bystanders – it is life, or the fight for it. People whose identity the silhouetted nature of this technique helps to preserve, in the same way that it shows us its vitality, equal in warmth to that of all of us.

Finally, faced with the work and what it witnesses, faced with the possibility of a sensitive knowledge that is the result of everything we experience as people and as a collectivity, what has changed and what is urgent to change? Is the virus a greater evil, or a psychodemic?

Fábio Furtado