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PHOTOGRAPHY

Analog Medium format workshop – 2026

with Anoush Abrar

Deconstructed Portrait The goal of this workshop, led by photographer Anoush Abrar, is to explore the meaning of the contemporary portrait.  Working with the concept of the “deconstructed portrait,” the students created an image in pairs.  The Digital Medium Format workshop week serves as an introduction to both photography equipment and specialized software.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Clara Besson – L'Or du Transvaal / L'Or des DuBois

by Clara Besson

L'Or du Transvaal / L'Or des DuBois is the first volume of the Recto / Verso collection, which aims to encourage Swiss people, and especially young people, to question the history of their country. This volume explores how Switzerland has been and remains imperialist, through the story of the DuBois family from Le Locle, who left to exploit gold in Transvaal in the 19th century. Each double page mirrors two simultaneous realities: the imperialist narrative on the left and its multidimensional critique on the right, the same events told from radically different points of view, by entities that coexist without ever directly interacting. In a context of rising far-right politics across the West, L'Or du Transvaal / L'Or des DuBois intends to fight by the transmission of knowledge beyond academic circles.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Darina Komm – Threads

by Darina Komm

For centuries, the knowledge of embroidery was passed down among women, gradually becoming a tradition and an integral part of culture. Threads reflects a contemporary perspective, exploring embroidery as a form of visual communication. Here, ornaments treated as a structured language — one that carries ideas of protection, identity, and conection. Rooted in the traditions of Central Ukraine between late 19th and early 20th centuries, Threads combines research with interpretation, offering not only historical insight but also a personal attempt to reconnect with cultural memory through photography, pattern, and storytelling.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Siméon Dubuis – UNFOLDING TOPOGRAPHIES

by Siméon Dubuis

In recent years, the mountains have been crumbling spectacularly, and with them, various myths. Far from the idyllic images of postcards, valleys and villages are cut off from the world; in the worst cases, they are wiped off the map. Against this backdrop, UNFOLDING TOPOGRAPHIES re-examines the clichés of Alpine representation to propose new visual narratives. This graphic research project intervenes at the very heart of the production matrix where images are created, appropriating both industrial production techniques such as offset printing and more traditional methods such as copper engraving. UNFOLDING TOPOGRAPHIES explores how our representations shape our environment and influence our interactions with it.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Noa Jetzer – Alula

by Noa Jetzer

Born from an interest in animation, digital media and accessibility, Alula is a project developed in collaboration with occupational therapist Romain Savioz. It explores the following question: what might a digital environment designed to foster autonomy in emotional self-regulation among young people look like? Conceived as a resource space alongside therapy, the project envisions its visual universe through a stop-motion animation, pen-and-ink illustrations and interactive prototypes. Together, they outline an evolving digital garden where each action contributes to shaping a unique landscape. By combining analogue techniques with interactive design, Alula develops a sensitive, narrative and accessible approach to digital graphic design.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Nadia Laprés – Partysound

by Nadia Laprés

Partysound is a musical game designed for children. Using cards placed on a table, participants build a score that is performed collectively while moving around it. Three colours correspond to three sound sources: hands, percussion, and voice. Each player is assigned a colour and performs the corresponding symbols as they appear in the score. The music emerges through alternating actions and active listening. Presented in a box containing several game scenarios to help discovering the rules, the project encourages experimentation and the pleasure of being and making music together. Developed from a reflection on the methods of musical education, Partysound offers a freer and more accessible way of approaching music.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Korakot Unasit – Close stranger

by Korakot Unasit

It all starts with a friendship — born by chance, through moments shared in virtual spaces. Without ever meeting physically, a relationship took shape. This paradox raises a question: what does it truly mean to be present for someone? From this experience comes Close Stranger, a moving image project rooted in the world of video games that explores how a bond can evolve in a dematerialized environment, where presence defines itself differently. The trailer gives form to these immaterial ties that inhabit a shared world, but are never fully accessible to one another.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ANALOG MEDIUM FORMAT WORKSHOP

with Anoush Abrar

DRIVE For this week’s theme, “Drive,” first-year photography students were asked to create a portrait shot on medium-format film. Inspired by the sensation of a first driving experience, travel, empowerment, or discovery, the week aimed to explore the relationship between one or more people and a vehicle.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL Light House

with Jean-Vincent Simonet, Léonard Guyot, Florian Pittet (Sigmasix), Vincent Jacquier, Julien Gurtner

During a week of collaborative work, first-year students in the Visual Communication department at ECAL were given the ambitious task of creating a complete audiovisual experience, designing a light and sound architecture based solely on five original musical compositions. Using a central totem-like screen installation and projections on the surrounding walls, enhanced with lasers, they created a visual environment, broadcast in real time, which was presented as a performance to the public at the end of the week. The aim was to construct a universe capable of fully utilizing the space and the various stage elements, inviting the audience to move around and experience the live performance in its entirety. Five cross-functional creative groups, each with a different sound base, were supervised by Jean-Vincent Simonet and Léonard Guyot to produce images and test them throughout the week on the device, which was developed, set up and operated by a sixth group under the supervision of Florian Pittet, Matthieu Minguet and Achille Masson.

PHOTOGRAPHY

CRÉATION PHOTOGRAPHIQUE

with Natacha Lesueur

Abracadabra! Starting with projects centered on a common theme, students develop their own in-depth work exploring the concept of “magic” in photography. They create a project that explores the relationship between reality and the imagination, using photography as a tool for revealing, transforming, and interpreting reality.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Applied Photography – 2026

with Calypso Mahieu

Le temps des Fleurs This course, which is both practical and technical, requires students to develop a true photographer’s eye. Its goal is to introduce students to, or help them refine their skills in various photographic genres, such as still life, portraiture, and architecture, as well as documentary and staged photography. These disciplines demand particular attention and great precision in the selection of models, locations, and objects. Mastery of composition, framing, and the management of light, whether natural or artificial, is essential for a successful shot. Throughout the course, students are guided to refine their observational skills and their ability to create images that are both precise and expressive.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

GEOFF HAN – WORK AND TURN

by Leandra Adler, Cansu Celen, Layana Comte, Anaïs Dermont, Camille Genoud, Eve Gremaud, Eloïse Guillod, Mathis Harmant, Marie Hintzy, Matteo Lucca, Maxime Manera, Gaëtan Mauclair, Mathys Mauron, Emma Morisseau, Sara Pedersoli, Lucie Pittet, Hélène Prongué, Leonardo Mariucci, Alice Refachinho, Justine Renevey, Gaspard Schlatter, Laura Simons, Vu Toni Thien Duc, Maïa Yassin, Jonas Zesiger

In November 2025, 27 ECAL students took part in Work and Turn, a workshop led by Geoff Han exploring the theme of labor and the often overlooked work that sustains the school. Located in a former IRIL knitwear factory in the industrial area of Renens, ECAL occupies a vast building whose daily functioning depends on many visible and invisible forms of labor. Over five days, students worked in small teams to produce a collective 96-page pocket-sized publication. Each pair created an 8-page photographic visual essay focusing on a specific aspect of labor at ECAL. Rather than relying on traditional portraits, the projects explored more poetic and indirect ways of documenting traces of work through spaces, gestures, materials, and infrastructures. The entire publication was manually printed on an offset press by the students themselves, in either black or red and black. The printing process was a central part of the workshop: participants prepared the plates, set up the press, and ran the prints. This hands-on production process echoed the theme of labor explored throughout the publication.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Création d'image - Double Reading - BA1 2025-2026

with Guy Meldem

First-year students were invited to design a 16-page publication. By experimenting with duotone through various printing techniques, they structured a dual reading experience dependent on the printed colors.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Maisie Cuisine Book

with Maisie Cousins

The aim of this workshop, led by photographer Maisie Cousins, is to use photography as a tool to broaden our powers of observation. During the week, students explored macro photography to create miniature and abstract worlds using everyday objects and accessories. This invites us to reflect: what else are we overlooking in our immediate environment?

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL x Polaroid Foundation

with Douglas Mandry

This workshop brought together ECAL graduate artist Douglas Mandry, the Polaroid Foundation, and around thirty Bachelor Photography students. They had the exceptional opportunity to work with a camera that produces Polaroid films in a 40 × 60 cm format and weighs nearly 200 kg. This experience was made possible thanks to its operators, John Reuter and Harriet Browse, who introduced the students to the use of this unique device and the Polaroid Foundation team. Douglas Mandry provided the project’s artistic direction and supported the students in their experiments carried out directly with and on the films. The final result was presented as a collective exhibition on ECAL’s premises, revealing a particularly rich diversity of approaches and visions.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Dorian Pangallo – Sublime Démocratie

by Dorian Pangallo

In an era where crises follow one another and justify a state of permanent exception, Sublime Democracy is a critical multimedia campaign portraying democracies stripped of their foundations, yet upheld by persistent symbols sustaining the illusion. Designed as a contemporary fable, the work draws on precise presidential speeches and polished visuals, integrating AI as the engine of a critical process where falsehood becomes language. By playing with the codes of power, it questions our habituation to fear, authority, and dominant narratives.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Diego Steiner – Hybrid Modules

by Diego Steiner

Hybrid Modules explores the link between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technologies through the creation of a 3D-printed modular typographic tool for use with a manual letterpress. Designed on a grid, the modular alphabet becomes a set of physical dies, which can be inserted by hand into the press. The slow, repetitive process becomes an integral part of the visual language, making visible the time and care of the gesture. A series of A2 posters promotes a series of fictitious conferences entitled “ART, CRAFT & TECHNOLOGY - Guests in Switzerland”.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL × NNORMAL

with Nicolas Poillot

In September 2024, the start of the academic year at ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne, was highlighted by the beginning of our collaboration with trail equipment manufacturer Nnormal. At the same time, not far from our university, Kilian Jornet, the founder of the brand, gave our teams a taste for exploits by linking 82 peaks in the Alps over 4,000 meters high, shattering all records in the process. In trail running, as in photography, you need passion, discipline and endurance. Our Bachelor Photography students at ECAL are not all great sportsmen and women, but they are driven by the desire to achieve visual exploits. Trained in technical mastery, conceptual development and risk-taking, they spent three years in a field of exploration that allows them to seek out limits and chart their path. It's essential for them to get off the beaten track and find a visual language that sets them apart from the vast quantity of images that overwhelm us. ECAL has a long tradition of collaborating with top-level brands and professionals who, in addition to their own activities, wish to pass on their skills and experience to a passionate young generation looking for guidance in unfamiliar territory. Among them is Régis Tosetti, artistic director of Nnormal, who has a strong link with ECAL, where he trained for a degree in Visual Communication in 2005. Régis kicked off this collaboration with head coach Nicolas Poillot, also an art director. Nicolas forged his raw and elegant style by taking fashion towards the documentary. A guest lecturer at ECAL for several years, he has guided students tirelessly, with pragmatism and rigor, through the mapping of the brand and its visual expression. In a polluted, noisy world, saturated with superimposed stimuli, it is difficult to concentrate, to focus on a clear objective, a goal to look forward to. The opportunity offered by the collaboration between ECAL and Nnormal has encouraged a young generation of photographers to turn to the mountains. Nature is a terrain of escape, communion and adventure for an essential imagination made up of bodies and landscape. The main subject is the mediating element between these two components, the shoes that allow us to go further in this union. But there's much more than shoes in the work of Nicolas and his students: there are values of ecology, dry and wet atmospheres, solar and nocturnal lights, technical and organic textures, muscles and tense faces that achieve deliverance through their exploits. And finally, in trail running as in photography, despite sood technical and mental preparation and systematic study of the forecasts, there are unforeseen circumstances that force us to come up with improvised solutions that reveal new forms of beauty.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Indecisive Moment – 2025

with Jaya Pelupessy

This exhibition presents the outcome of a five-day workshop led by artist Jaya Pelupessy, where students explored the unstable terrain between creation and reproduction. Through hands-on experiments with various duplication methods and strategies of appropriation, the workshop invited a reconsideration of the image—not as a final product, but as a process, a question, a site of continuous transformation. Embracing moments of uncertainty, trial and error, and unexpected discovery, participants focused on what Pelupessy calls The Indecisive Moment: the in-between phase where outcomes are unclear and intention is disrupted by chance. These works reflect a shift from the pursuit of fixed meaning toward an image in flux—unfinished, open, and relational.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

Service Design - 2025

with Angelo Benedetto, Vincent Jacquier, Pauline Saglio, Calypso Mahieu

During the Service Design course, the 3rd year of the Graphic Design, Photography and Media & Interaction Design bachelors had to create multi-media projects. A collaboration of the Visual Communication department which had as subject the SDGs (*Sustainable Development Goals). The theme was called "For a good cause, make the SDGs a reality" and its objective was to allow students to develop a cause that is close to their hearts. Each project consists of at least two different media, one primary and one secondary. These projects could take any form that the students deemed relevant, be it a website, editions, posters, a video sequence or virtual reality.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL Night Live

with Vincent Veillon, Paul Walther, Florian Pittet (Sigmasix), Vincent Jacquier, Julien Gurtner

During an intensive week, first-year students from the Visual Communication department at ECAL had the opportunity to create and produce the first edition of ECAL Night Live. The goal was to design a show inspired by satirical television formats. Divided into multidisciplinary teams—including students from the Bachelor programs in Graphic Design, Media & Interaction Design, and Photography—they collaborated to create all the content, set design, and visual identity of the show, delivering a fully homemade project in record time. The main theme revolved around self-mockery, targeting the visual communication professions, students, and the institution itself, with a subtle touch of current events. This project was supervised by Vincent Veillon and Paul Walther, directors of the RTS show 52 Minutes, as well as Florian Pittet, a digital scenography expert who guided the creation of the show's set design.