What has been termed “lockdown” is the situation in February-March-April-May 2020 when a very large proportion of human beings on earth were forced by their states to stay at home for an average of ten weeks in order to avoid the spread of a coronavirus type virus with a very high contagion rate, called “Covid-19”. Global economies were hit very hard, unemployment exploded, cultural events were cancelled for months, inequalities worsened, violence against women increased, etc.
Except in a small number of countries, where the prevention of the risk of a pandemic was taken into account and where virological tests were carried out rapidly and extensively, allowing the virus to spread infinitely less, with very little impact on the life of the country and its inhabitants, most societies were very seriously damaged, not by the virus, but by the inefficiency of their administration, their poor public health policies, their paternalistic management of the collective which led to police surveillance projects rather than accountability dynamics. Lockdown was the only response, medieval and irresponsible in the way it was carried out, that was found in the face of the virus. Above all, it is a sign of the great fragility of societies at the beginning of the 21st Century, in which the human being as a being is not at the centre of the stakes.
Photographs, paintings, drawings, assemblies and texts by Benoît Labourdette (unless otherwise stated).