Between March and December 2021, the Mucem is hosting artist-in-residence Antoine d’Agata, a French photographer and filmmaker, who won the 2001 Niépce Prize and has been a member of the Magnum Photos cooperative since 2004. His projects often focus on wandering, marginality, the “street”, and vulnerable or stigmatised populations, and he has made his own life a true artistic experience.
Antoine d’Agata has been asked to provide a personal and subjective interpretation of the participatory collection, “Life under Lockdown”, launched by the Mucem in April 2020. The donations collected are presented alongside his own photography work from during lockdown. During his residency, he has also been developing an original creation, through ongoing field work at mass vaccination centres and the creation of a leporello diary incorporating into his own story fragments of other voices from anonymous sources (friends and family and people who donated to the collection), and from the media who dehumanise individuals by standardising or reducing them to numbers (statistics, extracts from press cuttings).
Finally, the social and political role of museums will be discussed between the lines as a metaphor for ordinary social objects entering museum collections. There are also sometimes the same ambiguities between protection and control, prevention and isolation.
