Renaud Philippe in Chandler

In March 2020, on the road connecting the Saguenay region and Québec City, in the middle of a snowstorm the winter storm, the one that means nothing exists except the stretch of road illuminated by your headlights and the enclosed space of the car – photographer Renaud Philippe is listening to the radio and hears the WHO declare a pandemic. Life, as we know it, stops. Following the path taken by numerous states around the world, Canada, from east to west, goes into lockdown. A moment as unreal as it is historically significant. Two days later, his bags packed and his photo material ready, he finds that his departure to the border between Brazil and Venezuela is cancelled.

As a documentary photographer, Renaud Philippe normally works on difficult situations, and there he found himself, in spite of himself, at the heart of the crisis, an invisible crisis, where the words COVID, pandemic, quarantine and curfew were not yet part of the daily vocabulary. He felt the same adrenaline, the same ultra-awareness of the environment, the same automatic reflexes. Somewhat instinctively he left Québec City, in semi-isolation in his car, and spent 21 days crossing Canada, alone on an infinite road. A wondering in a deserted country, convinced that the COVID crisis was the zero point of a period of turmoil, instability and major change whose entire scope we could not yet grasp.