Paris (AFP)
Deserted. Piazza Navona in Rome or Tahrir Square in Baghdad. While half of humanity is confined, AFPTV journalists set up their cameras on Wednesday April 8 at 4 p.m. local time in 16 cities around the world. They caught the moved, worried, surprised look of rare passers-by in the face of emptiness and isolation.
Usually Piazza Navona in Rome is "crowded with tourists, artists and resonates with music". On Arpoador beach, near Rio, "there is always lots to see, hippies selling crafts, surfers". At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin "we see masses of tourists" and in the Ikoyi district of Lagos a "hectic" life.
But since the appearance of the new coronavirus and the more or less strict containment measures depending on the country, in these cities as elsewhere in Tokyo, Jerusalem, Panama or Hollywood, there is no longer anything to see today to varying degrees that emptiness and isolation that shake feelings and feelings.
"The fact that these places appear empty displaces our essential pole: the confinement produces this that everyone is at home and no one knows where he lives", explains the French philosopher of science at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) Etienne Klein .
- "It's truly sad" -
Feel the void. Some are lost, like the Italian Marta Rezzano, tourist guide, 28, met Piazza Navona. "Living in the city on a daily basis, I miss being unable to show it, to talk about it, to walk the streets, to tread its places. It's really sad yes."
And others no longer recognize themselves there, such as the Brazilian Diego Reis de Aguiar, businessman, 31 years old, used to surfing the waves of Arpoador. "It's completely empty, it's difficult, it completely changes the face of the beach."
In fact, this impression of emptiness produces a "metamorphosis effect", underlines the philosopher author of the book "What is without being entirely, essay on the void" (South Act). "These places are identical to themselves and yet they are no longer completely recognizable: the human presence is part of them (…) and when they are emptied it gives the impression that they are reduced to their mineral version . Their true nature includes us. "
Sometimes you have to survive it. In Lagos, Nigerian street vendor Solomon Ekelo, 27, continues to roam the Ikoyi neighborhood because he is hungry. "It is not easy for us, who are on the street. We have no house, no home, no place to work, not even to sleep," he said.
Endure isolation. The hardest part for the Chinese Wang Huixian, a 57-year-old retiree met near the Forbidden City in Beijing, who can once again dance in gardens, from a distance, but not go to see her daughter and her grandson "because they live far away. "
And worry about the future. The German osteopath Bettina Kohls, 41, interviewed at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, has "practically no more patients". In the bar and shop district of Shinjuku, in Tokyo, faced with the number of customers far fewer, the Japanese bartender Shoma Nakada, 23, "worries about the economy". "With the Olympic games which have been postponed ... It happens when we thought we would see the country take off".
- Take time -
But emptiness also means discovering another city. "One of the things that has changed here, which I had never seen until today, is the grass between the cobblestones of the square," said Marta Rezzano in Piazza Navona. "It is unreal, as if nature took possession of the monuments. Birds, seagulls, there is everything, I had never seen so many birds in Rome."
In reality, says Etienne Klein, "these places are not empty but hollowed out". They are said to be empty "because they seem to escape their vocation but in fact they are full of other things that we may see less when they are full".
And confinement also means taking time. The unexpected positive consequence of the epidemic for the South Korean Moon Byeong-seol, student, 28 years old. "It was beneficial to stay at home: I learned to cook better and I had plenty of time to think about myself and my future," he said in Gwanghwamun Square in Bucheon near Seoul.
"We are like on a raft in the heart of the cyclone", summarizes the French Fabrice Kebour, 56, light designer, on a ride on the Montmartre hill in Paris. "That is to say that, here, everything is calm, the time begins to stretch in a Proustian way, we start to contemplate, we start to take the time to stroll, while everything around me, of us is chaos. "
And indeed, says the philosopher, "spatial confinement makes it possible to envisage a long-term form". "Perhaps the agitation of the present prevents us from thinking about the future, the confinement allows us to set ourselves apart from time. It is a step on the inner side."
"Confinement in other countries is what we experienced. We experienced it when the regime forces bombed our region, we lived it folded up in underground cellars, we lived it in homes whose owners were killed, without seeing our friends, family, for days and weeks. "
video-dp / jhd
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