"Life During Lockdown," the collection

In the News

February 2021

Video: Objects from Lockdown

“Living Through Lockdown,” launched by the Mucem in the spring of 2020, brought together more than 600 personal accounts of this experience, which was both intimate and collective. Through poetic and enigmatic displays, we highlight a few objects that symbolize this pandemic.

The Mucem invited artist Antoine d’Agata to offer his personal interpretation of the collection, featuring 13,000 photographs he took during that same period, in the exhibition “Psychodémie,” on view through March 25, 2022, at the CCR de la Belle de Mai.

The digital booklet and the exhibition are part of the European TAKING CARE Project, which aims to explore the role and forms of engagement of museums in the face of social and environmental crises by viewing these institutions as “spaces of care.” The TAKING CARE Project is co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.

Photo: Pierre Girardin
Sound Design: Jeff Aron

Blue-collar workers in production facilities, white-collar workers in administration: work attire is regulated to meet standards of comfort or safety, for example, or to conform to more diffuse but equally prescriptive social codes, such as the suit-and-tie required of executives. Referring to people in this way—by metonymy, through a sartorial attribute that links them to a socio-professional category based on the economic sector in which they work—shows just how deeply ingrained these norms are. While clothes may not make the monk, they certainly make the worker and mark the rhythm of their workday. We swap out our work overalls for Sunday best, or our carefully ironed white shirt for weekend sweatpants.

But the professional dress code has been significantly disrupted by the practice of video conferencing and by how we frame our computer screens: we can attend a meeting in slippers or turn our kitchen into an office. The boundaries between professional and personal spaces, work and leisure, social appearances and private life are breaking down, blurring, and merging. For better or for worse—and not just in terms of fashion!

Wearing this collar, then, restores that division: a small daily ritual that marks a pause in the flow of the day’s activities, distinguishing how we behave and manage our appearance in different social contexts. The rule is accepted, and it’s reassuring. The Claudine collar—a true “model garment” that owes its name to the heroine of Colette’s novel—is for obedient children… but not too obedient. The collar thus takes on a deceptively well-behaved air! The nautical charts suggested by the fabric’s print—with its broken lines and faded pastel colors—invite a whimsical exploration of an ancient or lost world, a gentle escape from the confines of the screen, work, and even our confined daily lives!

The presence of animals warded off loneliness when “companionship”—precisely—was sorely lacking. While many donors mentioned the beneficial presence of common pets such as dogs and cats, others cited more surprising examples: some accounts describe the careful observation of migratory birds that bring life to the still, deserted outdoors, while others count with a gentle eye the living creatures that inhabit the enclosed home—creatures usually considered pests: mosquitoes, moths, various insects… As a result, the accepted dichotomy between the wild and the domestic has been somewhat upended.

Moreover, and paradoxically, it was the domestic nature of the pet that made it possible to escape one’s domestic space! Walking one’s pet ranked fifth among the permitted reasons for going out, attesting to its prevalence and to the quiet entry of this unique relationship between humans and animals into the legislative and political sphere. People could thus legally go out with their dogs—and sometimes even get away with a few workarounds… So much so that videos of fake dogs began circulating online, their DIY construction once again showcasing incredible creativity. In some apartment buildings, people were even seen offering their services to walk their neighbors’ dogs—and, let’s face it, to get themselves out of the house!

This piece, titled “Imaginary Egg Hunt,” features Easter chocolates with gleaming gold accents majestically displayed on toilet paper rolls serving as pedestals. While the former are usually hunted for during the Easter season, the latter are—in theory—hunted for far less often… and yet! Let’s recall last spring’s scenes of panic-buying, the television footage capturing empty supermarket shelves or lingering on shopping carts overflowing with this paper that had suddenly become so coveted, so precious, right alongside flour and pasta. Let’s recall the somewhat absurd calls for moderation directed at overly cautious consumers: because people were hesitant, they were told to be reasonable and not take too much—yet they still took a little extra… just in case…
Humor thus mocks what is, in fact, a recurring sign or symptom of crisis: the impulse to buy, driven by a far more sinister obsession—the fear of running out—is a true indicator of our collective psychology and of each individual’s perception of a threat. A fear of scarcity that might seem laughable, but which unfortunately also reflects social inequalities, since in the most vulnerable households, securing basic necessities—especially hygiene products—was sometimes very difficult. With its deliberate flashiness and unapologetic bad taste, the exhibition good-naturedly satirizes the excesses—sometimes amusing, sometimes dark—of mass consumption, in keeping with the subversive principles of kitsch. Just what’s needed to chase away… melancholy!

Living in the age of lockdown, then, also means measuring time, organizing it, breaking it down into segments, and filling it as our usual points of reference tend to fade away and time expands and stretches out. Work and sleep, but without the subway, the rhythm of the day loses its metronomic regularity. We are caught up in contradictory perceptions of time: the rhythm of the pandemic marked by its curves; the time of the health emergency, whose anticipated resolution takes the form of an ever-postponed horizon, much like the empty boxes on this calendar; the time of a motionless acceleration, where remote communication gives us a sense of both ubiquity and stagnation. The daily rituals we invent to ward off these paradoxes take many forms. The collection has thus brought together a vast number of personalized variations on these calendars that mark our daily lives. Diaries—written, drawn, filmed, and even embroidered; calendars, planners, lists, and activity charts presented as posters, collages, or patchworks; wooden lockers; pictorial series; or decorative furniture… The personal or collective journal became a true genre during lockdown, at the intersection of the daily schedule and autobiography. The diversity and originality of these creations are a wonderful source of inspiration for another seasonal calendar as we enter early December: the Advent calendar!

“Man is an animal endowed with language,” Aristotle tells us, but linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and even medicine have also taught us just how much we accompany our words with gestures. The pandemic has served as a harsh reminder of the importance of this nonverbal communication. Whether a simple social convention or an intimate gesture of affection, the handshake and its variations—hugs, embraces, kisses on the cheek—are now off-limits, replaced by “barrier” gestures designed to prevent the spread of disease. Bows, nods, hands placed on the chest or clasped in prayer, elbow bumps, and foot taps are inspiring new forms of greeting that transcend cultural, geographic, and generational boundaries.

The ambivalence of our gestures—which can convey respect, care, and gentleness, or, conversely, threats, risks, and withdrawal—is evident in this work. The benevolence of the caring gesture of holding hands actually makes the photograph by Isaac Lauwrence—which inspired this work—much more sinister: for the scales stored in the bags are in fact those from a record-breaking customs seizure in 2018. The pangolin is, in fact, the most poached animal in the world due to the supposed therapeutic properties attributed to it. This serves as a way to highlight just how much the upheavals imposed on the animal world and ecosystems—including illicit trafficking, industrial farming, deforestation, loss of natural habitat, and accelerated movement— in the name of what we associate with our quality of life, actually increase the risk of zoonotic transmission—the spread of diseases from animals to humans—which is the source of many epidemics.

For the first time, an epidemic has affected the entire planet. The human community has found itself unexpectedly united in the face of the virus’s spread; the scale is global. At the national level, the entire country has been placed under lockdown. While our personal situations are not all the same, we are all restricted in our movements. We all share this experience. But paradoxically, what defines this moment—what we remember—is not these national or global scales. Rather, it is the everyday reality of the spaces we inhabit. Each of us has our own sphere, our own walks, our own journeys, and our own strategies for getting around restrictions as well.

Does this mean that the proliferation of these individual relationships to space has eroded any sense of community among us? Not necessarily! What we have shared is the internalization of this boundary, the discovery of the unexplored yet nearby; it is a different relationship to the neighborhood, to our surroundings, and to public space: walking, detours, and pauses become the concrete, physical exercise of how we individually or collectively navigate the laws of urgency.

The Mucem has received several examples of creations that have helped people fill their free time by practicing new skills. The act of crafting an object takes on a whole new dimension. In this case, the self-taught artisan is an engineer who has played this game extensively online; he even developed a virtual app for it. Even as lockdown keeps us glued to our screens more than ever, he has stepped away from the virtual world to meticulously craft this game board, using a soldering iron as a pyrograph. The creation of this backgammon board is the result of a series of repurposings and transformations: of the medium (the board), the tool (the soldering iron), from the virtual to the physicality of wood, and from professional work to a leisure activity. As its creator tells us, “I found it very important to learn how to make the most of boredom (…) for me, it’s a positive representation of this strange period.” DIY reinvents objects and their functions with a freedom and ingenuity that open up new ways of sharing.

This form of entertainment is therefore, in the full sense of the word, a form of culture. For the act of diverting is precisely the original meaning of the word “entertainment,” which first refers to diverting a cultural heritage, and then, by extension, to diverting someone from their concerns—for example, by engaging in pleasant activities deemed secondary or trivial, such as games. On the contrary, entertainment is essential to our lives, philosophy retorts! For Blaise Pascal, it serves to escape the anxiety of our human condition, and for Roger Caillois, play suspends the conventions of reality to allow us to discover new rules and imagine new ways of sharing. It serves no purpose, and that is precisely why it is so useful.

Round and mischievous, standing on the tips of her grape-like toes, she looks out a window—a boundary that separates us from the outside world, yet also connects us to it—with a mixture of melancholy and curiosity. This ambivalence of thresholds—the boundaries between the inside and the outside—has been highlighted in many ways throughout the collection: the horizon is bounded, yet our gaze is sharper; objects diverted from their intended use make us feel estranged, prompting us to question our relationship with the outside world and with ourselves. They become revelations.

Writer Marcel Proust’s madeleine has become legendary: it is the taste of a pastry that involuntarily brings the past to the surface; it is the emotion evoked by an ordinary object or a seemingly insignificant sensation that triggers “the immense edifice of memory” and restores a buried truth. Much like the madeleine, museum objects also hold a sensory memory that is both intimate and collective. They do not reveal an absolute truth, but they suggest a new perspective and raise new questions about the experience of lockdown: it is so that we may observe and reflect together that the Mucem has launched this call for donations.