Horizon Ouest
26.03–10.04.2025
Bussigny

New transport infrastructures are being built, while former industrial wastelands are giving way to modern buildings and redeveloped outdoor spaces. Little by little, residents are taking over these new neighborhoods and adopting new habits.

To capture the first moments of life in these spaces, the association "Ouest lausannois : Prix Wakker 2011" invited second-year students in ECAL's Bachelor of Photography program to observe them throughout 2024.

The exhibition highlights 18 construction sites in progress or recently completed neighborhoods. Through their eyes, the students offer us original approaches to discovering, taming and appropriating these new spaces. At the end of the exhibition, everyone is invited to go and explore these places for themselves.

Photography has a unique relationship with the world around us, because it often depends on it. Far from documenting it in the strict sense of the word, photography has the capacity to transfigure and reveal the invisible or the unspeakable. At the request of the "Ouest lausannois: Prix Wakker 2011" Association, ECAL photography students have adopted this approach, exploring various territories in the western part of Lausanne.

As part of this commission, each student was allocated a specific location by lottery: a new district, a construction site or a singular building, on which he or she worked for one academic year. Faced with spaces that are sometimes unphotogenic, or even resistant to images, the challenge was to go beyond appearances, to enter into resonance with these places in order to grasp their own dynamics.

The photographs on display question our perception of these recent landscapes, and bear witness to the human activity taking place there. What do they say about the way we live and move around? Who are the people who inhabit these spaces? What landscape forms are emerging from these rapid transformations?

Through approaches that are at times sensitive and intimate, at times distanced and analytical, or guided by a formal fascination for the objects apprehended, the works presented reveal the density and diversity of everyday life. They give rise to a poetics of the city, inviting us to consider these territories not as mere functional backgrounds, but as spaces in their own right, bearers of histories, forms and an identity of their own - shifting and multiple, like those who inhabit them.