Lockdown series: A socially distanced archive

The Lockdown series starts at the onset of the Covid pandemic.

The trigger of being confined within your apartment walls, with nothing in sight but the apartment ceiling when looking to the sky. The absence of people, the lack of a visible horizon, intensified my desire to witness the world beyond once again. During the time when we were all inside, I was living in Brazil and made the decision to wake up at 5 AM to watch the sunrise via a live webcam on Copacabana Beach. That morning, I discovered that live webcams were spread across the globe. The Pantheon in Rome, where I had visited less than a year before COVID struck, was deserted at 11 AM, an unbelievable sight on any ordinary day.

This realization was the start to collect live images of locations worldwide and document how they appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic. Observing how the world coped with the pandemic and witnessing solitary wanderers became my obsession and a new way to travel.

Fast forward to 2023, three years since it all began, I return to re-document the same locations I captured in 2020.

Time peels away the paint on walls, working persists, distances between humans shrink, places go under renovations, selfies are back, and from the skyscrapers, nothing seems to change that much. A white car remains parked in the same spot on Copacabana for three years or it just a coincidence?

Nature is still there, birds continue to fly, the sun still rises every day, and I dare say, perhaps the world is even more beautiful without us in it.