From March to May

In the first months of the pandemic of 2020, Tatiana Trouvé was isolated in her studio in Montreuil with only her dog for company. On March 15, 2020, two days before the beginning of lockdown in France, she printed out the front page of the newspaper Libération bearing the headline “Coronavirus : le jour d’avant” [Coronavirus: The Day Before] and made a drawing over it. Each day for the next eight weeks, she drew on the front page of a different national newspaper from somewhere in the world—”El País”, “La Repubblica”, “The New York Times”, “The Guardian”, the “South China Morning Post”…

From March to May stands as a witness to the collective history of the time; a chronicle of the fear, despair, confusion, anger, and hope felt throughout the world. Many of Trouvé’s drawings juxtapose the private space of her studio with dramatic reportage from a time when reality seemed to exceed fiction. In others she drew trees, animals, clocks, globes, and medical diagrams over stark headlines and images.

The drawings convey the isolation and existential threat that marked the pandemic. Over a front page from the “Times of India”, Trouvé drew a bat, the probable source of coronavirus. A drawing of her dog Lulu silhouettes a line of “socially distanced” people queuing to buy food, and a tendril of leaves grows around a headline from the Kenyan newspaper “The Star” reporting on a possible herbal cure.

Trouvé’s lockdown drawings suggest that everything is connected, everything is entangled: private and public, individual and collective, from mutating genes in a bat to the fate of humankind.