“We are but a little solar heat, stored and organised, a memory of the Sun. A little phosphorus burning in the brain-membranes of the world.” — Paul Cézanne. In the circumstances that have marked the world in recent months, we wished to share VIRUS, Antoine d'Agata's view of the health crisis caused by Covid-19 and its social and political resonances. An exhibition at the Fondation Brownstone in Paris presents an installation of 1111 photographs made by Antoine d'Agata between 17 March and 11 May 2020. From the first day of the lockdown that followed the Covid-19 epidemic, Antoine d'Agata roamed the streets of Paris with a thermal camera to record, in his own way, the viral episode that turned the city into a strange theatre of wandering souls, bowed heads and fleeing bodies. It was as an “agent of contamination” that he engaged in the experience opened up by the epidemic and the lockdown. First drawn to the way this thermodynamic device records the infrared radiation emitted by bodies and varying with their temperature, he was quickly fascinated by a process that reduces human subjects to essential figures, stripped of superfluous characteristics. Installed for two months in the offices of the Magnum agency in Paris, he used the thermal technique to convey the saturation of the city deserted in lockdown: a city plunged into silence, crossed by bodies with stereotyped attitudes, inhabited above all by the homeless, who appear in the image as the last truly living and resistant bodies, the austere compositions tinged with flames offering an alternative, dystopian vision of the emptying streets. “This documentary work is dominated by the use of thermal technology because it offers the capacity to capture information to which photography as we know it has no access. It is not a question of aesthetics but of a technique that allows me to generate a visual language that grasps the reality of ‘bare life’ from a perspective at once sensorial, political and existential. I hunted the heat stored by bodies, in the street first, then very quickly in the Covid-19 continuous-care and intensive-care units. Over these last two months I produced 13,000 images, sometimes sleeping for days on end within the hospital structures themselves, photographing the interactions between doctors, nurses, caregivers, paramedics and patients, the gestures and rituals of medicine, care, hygiene and comfort. It is this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this inevitability of social death and physiological death that I have tried to grasp, through a language of the senses and of resistance that transfigures bodies, the thermal image bringing forth forms, postures, figures, curves and zones imperceptible to the naked eye. It is through the decoding of power relations stemming from economic logics in full mutation, and with the help of experimental aesthetic strategies, that I wanted to reveal how bodies resist their capitalist domestication and the total surveillance of conduct. The serial, futuristic character of bodies domesticated by the daily routine of confinement is heightened and denounced by the cruelty of the facts that the images record.” — Antoine d'Agata