Silent Blocks

Silent Blocks parallels two points of view on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Myr Muratet has photographed, in his own way, a silent Paris. In Toronto, at the same time, the science journalist David Cayley questions the meaning of this crisis and its mediatization, drawing in particular on the work of Ivan Illich.

In the spring of 2020, in Toronto, David Cayley, former science journalist for Canadian public radio and writer, questions the pandemic. Drawing on his knowledge of the philosophical work of his friend Ivan Illich, he wonders whether the “systems ontology” in which we live has created this state of crisis. He warns of a form of negation of death, which “conceals everything else, namely the large-scale experimentation of social control and social obedience, the legitimization of telepresence as a mode of sociability and teaching, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics and the reinforcement of preventive measures as the foundations of social life.”

In Paris in the spring of that year, with the introduction of containment to curb the coronavirus pandemic, the street suddenly emptied. The health system backed up by a police system allowed the government to step up its security policy, initiated years earlier with the Vigipirate plan, without encountering much resistance. The photographer Myr Muratet has documented, in his own way, the silent city.