2026 Diplomas – Master Fine Arts

Published: June 24, 2026

Discover the diploma projects from the Master Fine Arts.

Projects

FINE ARTS

Hugo Baud – ALCOVE

by Hugo Baud

ALCOVE is an installation located in the ECAL lobby that invites a reflection on such an exhibition space. It consists of the school's display walls, each measuring 2.06m by 2.8 0m. The structure, which is 6.18 m long, 4.12 m wide, and 2.80 m high, forms a rectangle on the floor with an area of 25.46 m². The exterior of the structure is painted in S 1502-R, the official color of the building's walls, and the interior in RAL 9016, the color designated for exhibition spaces. The name ALCOVE echoes that of the iconic sofas in the ECAL entrance hall.

FINE ARTS

Iulia Bucuresteanu – Somewhere in Draculaland

by Iulia Bucuresteanu

Somewhere in Draculaland explores how the figure of Dracula shaped the Western construction of Eastern Europe through imperialist and neo-gothic frameworks. It examines how these narratives persist today through Hollywood-driven, pseudo-folkloric images that reinforce cultural hierarchies. Drawing on the figure of the vampire and its associations with contagion, otherness, and invasion, this project traces how these images emerge from late 19th-century anxieties and continue to circulate. Somewhere in Draculaland focuses on the way these representations detach from their literary origins and are reintroduced as pseudo-folkloric truths, creating a cycle in which identity is reduced to mere recognizability, to the benefit of Western cultural authority.

FINE ARTS

Hugo Cuenot – A strip of fruitful land of our own (Tereska Torres / Karim Kattan / Hugo Cuenot)

by Hugo Cuenot

Mixing sound and sculpture, A strip of fruitful land of our own is an installation of three paper windows with dedicated texts that can be heard near them. Made out of delicate Xuan paper, the frail windows are a reproduction of the artist's home windows, brining his fragile perception into the space. The three texts, read in three different voices and coming from three different timelines, weave stories of displacement, war, desire and queerness, bringing a vision of the world to be seen and heard through these veil-thin Swiss windows. As the fragility of our perception of the world is constantly challenged by the stories we are told, now is the time to listen to them.

FINE ARTS

Gaia Del Santo – nothing happens in the absence of repetition

by Gaia Del Santo

nothing happens in the absence of repetition is a series of works centered on quotes taken from press releases and exhibition texts for shows or works the artist saw over the course of their Master's degree. This series takes place within a research on how the necessity of branding under platform capitalism is accelerating the standardization of self-expression, and how this manifests in the arts, where the commercial ties of this indispensable tool are decried and denied. The citations were selected based on their ability to describe the artist's overall practice or a particular work of theirs. Through this selection, this project probes a double-bind: the expectation of an artist's indisputable originality and their need to locate themselves within a legible lineage.

FINE ARTS

Olive Godlee – Me and Other People's Children

by Olive Godlee

Me and Other People's Children is a triptych, made with graphite transferred onto raw canvas. The source images are photographs taken by the artist, with and of the children in their care. On the lower right appears a text message bubble, sent by the artist/nanny to the mother of the children. This piece is a continuation of a body of work that grapples with the triangulation of the nanny, the mother, and the child.

FINE ARTS

Taleb Lachheb – FRANCE FIST: EXPORAMA

by Taleb Lachheb

FRANCE FIST: EXPORAMA is an installation composed of cardboard sculptures and a text read through a speaker. This project treats language as an unstable material, eroded by performativity. Sentences produce unexpected connections between distant subjects, such as body, family, work, sexuality, society, future. Meaning is not demonstrative: it emerges through successive collisions and shifts. The whole work proposes a fragmentary reading, close to a "Paranoid Reading", where relations between elements remain unstable and paradoxical.

FINE ARTS

Asia Lapai – ICI UNE PLANTE A ÉTÉ VOLÉE PAR UNE PERSONNE SANS SCRUPULE ET SANS RESPECT POUR NOTRE COLLECTION

by Asia Lapai

"THIS PLANT HAS BEEN STOLEN BY A PERSON WITHOUT SCRUPLES AND WITHOUT RESPECT FOR OUR COLLECTION" is a sentence taken from the signs in the greenhouse of the Geneva Botanical Garden, added when a plant goes missing. It opens a reflection on exoticism as a production of narratives and power relations, structured by the opposition between "here" and "elsewhere". Little Chewy is a meeting with a dock worker from Liverpool, a former major port of the transatlantic slave trade. These fragments give rise to contradictory or revised narratives, maintained in opacity. This project questions desire, power, and representation, as well as the colonial shaping of spaces and its lasting effects on living beings, through the hypothesis of a necro-aesthetic regime.

FINE ARTS

Charly Mirambeau – There Is No Memorial

by Charly Mirambeau

Seats from the erotic cinema Le Moderne, wall, 5.6 mm hole, magnet-mounted photograph on steel plate with oak frame. There is no memorial for the person killed or for the two people injured in the far-right homophobic terrorist attack that took place on February 19, 2002, at the erotic cinema Le Moderne, located on Avenue William-Fraisse 2 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

FINE ARTS

Marta Morandini – Sponde

by Marta Morandini

Sponde is a film that dwells on the passage between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence of three friends during a summer's day. The girls part from their friends and the crowded beach and set out along the banks of the river. The landscape gradually opens up, human voices give way to the sounds of nature and the animals that inhabit the river. In this silence, a vision of a metamorphosis of bodies and landscape unfolds in a unique symbiosis. As evening falls, one of them is seized by an inexplicable stirring of the soul and turns back, without warning her friends who have fallen asleep on the rocks. The other two, upon waking, continue walking in the direction of the water, becoming small figures lost on the horizon.

FINE ARTS

Matteo Pizzolante – make room for the miracle

by Matteo Pizzolante

Based on the reiteration and development of seemingly simple combinations and alterations, make room for the miracle explores everyday matters, traditional techniques, and recycled objects stemming from ordinary actions. Pushed beyond their own form, these elements set the rhythm of a production driven by a contradictory and ubiquitous aesthetic flow that never allows itself to be fully fixed and remains exposed to continuous deviations. Inputs coming from multiple directions chase one another, overlap, and hybridize. Rather than offering a synthesis, the works attempt to stage a tension: that between the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and the impossibility of fully belonging to any single one. It is in this friction that space shifts, expands, and cracks.

FINE ARTS

Matthias Reclus – Z to A & A to Z

by Matthias Reclus

"they send you home with a bag full of yarn it's good therapy they say make something out of it months later when the ice breaks up in the bay and you reopen the sun porch it turns out to be a soft woollen purple and black thing a thing to wrap around you when you're cold when you're trying to warm up to the fact that this has got to stop the crocheting the crochety behavior hooking unravelling" "Vanity Shades", Mary Howes, 1990

FINE ARTS

Daniel Walcher – Familiar Structures

by Daniel Walcher

The physical heart of Familiar Structures is a series of four oil paintings depicting financial diagrams. The artist painted entire simulated environments — gallery walls, shipping crates — surrounding the works. These nested layers expose a mise en abyme where the physical painting permanently houses a simulated performance of its own exhibition space. The project anticipates its own "afterlife": being digitally documented, the physical canvases return to data and into the algorithmic networks from which they were derived. The "digital mirror" — an interactive network graph — allows viewers to trace the exact algorithmic data paths that materialized these structures. Hence, Familiar Structures, engages the invisible networks we inherit, operate within, and replicate.