Without swerving into didactic messaging—he avoids explicit references to the virus, or even loaded associations like hope or loss—Sibony’s labyrinthine theater reflects the mental gymnastics and displacements involved in grappling with flux.

There are risks with every surgery. For the most part, these remain hypothetical scenarios only realized as part of a phantasmagoric paranoia: a clumsy incision, the quivering hand of your surgeon, an unforeseen lump. Anticipating this obsessive worrying, hospitals aim to reassure us through a compensatory iconography of total sterility.