The COVID-19 epidemic emptied city places, tinned public sites and readjusted sub-levels of urban routines. Have physical distancing and social isolation already established a new mode to live together that won’t cease after the lockdown is cancelled? That is a large research and political question that each society will strive to answer months and years after the Day 0. What is immediatly visible, is how the lockdown bared deeper material infrastructure of the cities, reducing networks of usual bodily interactions but also generating new ephemeral ones. A short visual study examines signs of presence dispersed in urban spaces deserted and put under control of civic self-discipline and police surveillance.
Hollow sites
Urban institutions immediately «frozen» with the declared lockdown or progressively shut down in the passed weeks expose the city as if it was a set of specimen preparations. The metaphor of open-air museum gains here a full palpability. Visible through windows, fences and prohibitive ribbons, the trace of previously frenetic urban motion displays itself halted and decomposed into dormant shops and churches, cafés and construction sites, hotels and parks. A kind of perfect museum inventory charged with ethnographic and administrative value. Its historical value is still low two months after the full stop. But one may already feel a soft vibration of time machine.
