From November 14 to December 4, 2014, Elac Gallery presents Vertige des correspondances (Vertiginous parallels), an exhibition by ECAL's Fine Arts Master students, while ECAL launches an eponymous publication. The show and the book are the twofold outcome of a research project directed by Julien Fronsacq with the support of HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.
The works of Charles Blanc-Gatti (1890-1966) are largely unknown. In his search for synesthetic harmony, this musicalist painter also played with a loss of spatial markers. These two sides of Blanc-Gatti's art are explored in this project, through the relationship the artist entertained with the alpine space.
The show presents a novel selection of artworks and documents by Charles Blanc-Gatti, together with works by student-researchers Jérôme Baccaglio, Anaïs Defago, Arthur Fouray, Julien Gremaud, Marine Julié, Emanuele Marcuccio, Rubén Valdez and Linda Voorwinde.
Vertiginous Parallels is also a bilingual (FR/EN) publication comprising 188 pages with 85 reproductions from Blanc-Gatti's archives. Published by ECAL and distributed by Presses du réel, the book is edited by Julien Fronsacq in collaboration with Lucile Dupraz, with graphic design by Marietta Eugster and Teo Schifferli, and photographs by Jonas Marguet. Experts from various fields have contributed essays, including the music specialist Maxime Guitton, the art historian and curator Gallien Déjean, the cinema historian Teresa Castro, the artist and historian of medicine Jelena Martinovic, and the art historian and modern danse specialist Sarah Burkhalter.
Documents and works by Charles Blanc-Gatti courtesy the Swiss Film Archive, the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne.
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MA FINE ARTS
by Alessandra Ghiazza
In the empty spaces I find pieces of dreams fields and water, of the forgotten green. A stratification of memories that leads to reveal experiences in natural landscapes, real but also places suspended between memory and the dreamlike, creating through geometric and repetitive shapes a space of contemplation on places, to find them again; postcards of a fragile and continuously changing landscape.
MA FINE ARTS
by Axel Mattart
Tired of Fighting Against Your Brain ?
MA FINE ARTS
by Camila Polania
Some say the body arrives first, and the soul takes longer. This installation begins with that delay, in the tension between presence and absence. Instructions of Rematriation is a video installation projected onto a wind-moved fabric, a surface that never fully settles. In front, white Rimax chairs evoke everyday spaces of waiting across Latin America: porches, patios, sidewalks. The work follows the passing of a single day, tracing the slow return to the body after displacement. Through video, writing, textile, and sound, the installation holds a kind of return, not geopolitical, but personal and ancestral: a political and spiritual reconnection with what was once left behind.
MA FINE ARTS
by Giorgio Cassano
ZONA DI SACRIFICIO is a film study that fuses documentary, ethnography, and poetic montage around the Fiume Tara—Taranto’s revered “miracle river.” Through a tapestry of memories, legends, visions, and personal testimonies, the film explores how this sacred source has sustained local identity and resilience, even as the encroachment of the ILVA steelworks has turned the surrounding landscape into a literal “sacrifice zone.” It is both a visual elegy to a once-pure watercourse and a poignant reflection on environmental violence, tracing the uneasy coexistence of spiritual reverence and industrial devastation in a community striving to reclaim its voice.
MA FINE ARTS
by Ludovico Orombelli
Sinopia is the culmination of a research project carried out at ECAL on the techniques and images that have shaped the Western imaginary. A scene from The "Legend of the True Cross", painted in the 15th century, has been reproduced using the same materials that its author, Piero della Francesca, employed to sketch the preparatory drawing on the wall before completing it in paint. The image thus reappears in its earliest phase, as a ghostly presence that invites us to reflect on the presence and role of the past within our present time.