10 Days After There Was Only SilenceStreet Photography — Andrea Scirè

Project Info

23 February 2020. In the streets of Palagonia, Sicily, there was music.

It was carnival. People laughed and danced as if the pandemic were something distant, abstract, belonging to someone else’s world. White masks — festive, innocent — moved close together until dawn. Coloured weapons made of plastic and confetti. The particular joy of a community that does not yet know what is coming.

Dark omens.

Ten days later, there was only silence.

10 Days After There Was Only Silence is not a series about the pandemic. It is a series about the precise moment before — the last images of a normality that did not know it was ending. Carnival as an unwitting farewell. Joy as an unconscious act of resistance. The silence that followed was not the subject of these photographs. It is what makes them unbearable to look at.