The Mechanics of Cinema in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
with Benoit Rossel
This research project by the Film Department at ECAL aims to assess the impact of artificial intelligence on cinema and film education.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Rationality/Expressivness - Carnal Verona Workshop
with Yanis Carnal, Raphaël Verona
The Swiss style, also known as the International Style, established itself as the symbol of a radical approach to graphic design and typography. It embodies an ideal of efficiency and rationality. Omnipresent more than half a century after its emergence, does it still hold the same relevance today? What is its influence on our imaginations and our practice? Doesn't Switzerland have other facets through which to communicate, and what new graphic and typographic languages could represent them?
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
RE-STRUCTURE
with RNDR STUDIO
During this one-week workshop, Master Digital Experience Design students used machine learning tools to decompose music videos into their constituent parts: segmented scenes, detected gestures, extracted colors, analyzed beats, separated audio stems, transforming linear audiovisual artifacts into structured datasets. These components were then reimagined as interactive, non-linear systems: explorable maps, generative timelines, rhythm-driven interfaces, and self-recomposing structures built with the OPENRNDR framework.
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.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Enshittification - 2026
with Tibor Udvari
Many platforms degrade over time, shifting from useful tools into manipulative systems. In this workshop, we explore enshittification as a creative method by modifying existing websites or developing small web experiments that exaggerate friction, automation, overload, and disorientation in order to reveal the underlying logics.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Workshop - Rachel de Joode - 2026
with Rachel de Joode, Clément Lambelet
For this workshop, ECAL invited Rachel de Joode, Berlin-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between photography, sculpture, and digital images. During the week, students experimented with transforming photographic images into three-dimensional forms. Starting from simple concepts, they produced or gathered image material intended for printing and treated images as surfaces to cut, fold, layer, and assemble into sculptural objects. Through rapid tests and material experimentation, the workshop encouraged students to move repeatedly between image, surface, object, and documentation. By working with printing, scale, and spatial placement, they explored how photographic images can gain physical presence and occupy space beyond the screen.
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.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Betaverse – 2026
with Mario Von Rickenbach
This project brings together a series of experiments created by students exploring the intersection between physical reality and immaterial imaginary worlds. Using a mixed reality headset, they transform their environment into experimental spaces where real elements become supports for digital creations.
Arboricrop — Next generation agriculture using real-time information from tree crops
with Stéphane Halmaï-Voisard, Younès Klouche, Frederik Mahler-Andersen Pietro Alberti, Maxwell Ashford, Alain Bellet, Laurent Soldini
Arboricrop is a research project conducted by a multidisciplinary consortium bringing together Vivent Biosignals, Changins – University of Viticulture and Oenology, and ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (HES-SO), with the support of Innosuisse. Its objective is to develop a miniaturized plant electrophysiology sensor designed for use in real agricultural conditions: the VITA Mini Sensor.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Talk to me – 2026
with Alain Bellet
By combining code, electronics, and physical prototyping, first-year students design interactive objects that react, respond, and invite interaction, gathered under the title Talk To Me. Using dialogue as playground and inspired by conversational interfaces, the projects transform physical objects into new forms of interaction.
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
The Modular Mindset
with Antonin Waterkeyn
From connected watches to large-scale billboards, digital interfaces now operate across all scales. Designing a visual identity in this context requires thinking in terms of systems that can adapt to multiple formats, uses, and rhythms. This workshop explores the creation of modular, animated identities for a fictional music label, drawing on motion design and procedural logic. Using Cavalry, students develop dynamic visual systems that transform according to precise rules, while maintaining graphic coherence and a strong relationship to the sound universe.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Beyond The Screen – 2025
with Angelo Benedetto
Beyond the screen - is a series of interactive machines developed by students in their first year of Bachelor Media & Interaction Design. These systems are inspired by the relationship between instructions and execution within a computer system. These machines create text through a modular typographic system.
FILM STUDIES
Workshop Shitty Rigs
Workshop led by Michael William Farino, Jonathan Ricardo Argudo and Herbert Mayer and given to students in the Bachelor's degree programmes in Cinema and Industrial Design.
FILM STUDIES
Workshop with Benoît Dervaux
by Noé Bregnard, Eva Rust, Victor Durand Matinella, Lou Haenggi, Samuel Harari, Hana Magimel, Nolan Grando, Mileny Viera de Andrade, Zélia Zanone
Second-year Bachelor's students attended a workshop with Belgian cinematographer Benoît Dervaux, known for his work on the Dardenne brothers' films. He was responsible for the cinematography on the Swiss films Laissez-moi by Maxime Rappaz (2023) and À bras-le-corps by Marie-Elsa Sgualdo (2025).
PHOTOGRAPHY
Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025
with Simone Niquille, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
For this workshop, ECAL invited Simone C Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam whose practice investigates how digital images, computer vision, and 3D technologies shape the way bodies and objects are represented in contemporary visual culture. Through her research platform Technoflesh, Niquille examines the infrastructures behind digital imagery (from stock images and 3D assets to machine vision systems) and the cultural assumptions embedded in them. Her work reveals how datasets, rendering software, and visual standards influence how bodies, materials, and environments are modeled and understood.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
COUNTDOWN – 2025
with Mario Von Rickenbach
The students worked on an interactive countdown in a web environment. Each day, they were tasked with creating a new sketch, culminating in their own collection, which could also be combined with projects from the entire class.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Workshop - CGI WITH AREA OF WORK – 2025
with Area Of Work
The Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) Workshop is an introduction to 3D creation software that allows you to create images with photographic qualities that are not photographs. This workshop centers on the theme of “Minimal,” inviting students to explore the creative and technical foundations of contemporary CGI image-making. It emphasizes materiality and the expressive impact of reduction. Every form, light, and texture has a specific role, negative space guides the emotional tone, and fine details unify the composition.
PHOTOGRAPHY
ECAL at OFFPRINT Paris 2025
with Bruno Ceschel, Nicolas Polli, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
During Paris Photo 2025, ECAL will present a selection of its books at OFFPRINT Paris. ECAL Master Photography is pleased to present a selection of books created by its second-year students. This event offers an opportunity to engage live with the young photographers, exploring the origins of their projects and the stories behind each of these publications.
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?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Toggle - 2025
with Sébastien Matos
A collection of interface buttons designed and animated by first-year students of the Bachelor’s program in Media & Interaction Design. Each element includes a standard animation, an exaggerated animation, and an unexpected version. https://toggle.ecal-mid.ch/2025
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
Workshop NORM - A Shape in a Shape
with Dimitri Bruni (NORM), Manuel Krebs (NORM)
How can graphic design be promoted by demonstrating its fundamentals? Led by the studio NORM for first-year students, this workshop aims to highlight ECAL’s Graphic Design programme through the didactic lens of elementary instruction. Each day, students were assigned a global theme (A – Words, B – Images, C – Graphics, D – Drawings), along with a series of simple questions. By combining this input, they produced three collaborative double-sided posters, intended to be offset-printed for ECAL’s Open Days. Each poster features its own duotone combination and folds into a booklet. This project emphasizes how the combinatory potential of simple elements can become a powerful tool in graphic design, while underlining the importance of process in creation.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Digital Attention
with Irene Pereyra
Where does our attention go? In this workshop, first-year students become their own data researchers for 24 hours, observing when and why their phone draws focus. They track triggers, emotions, recovery time, control, context, apps used, duration, body language, energy, and inner dialogue. These everyday traces are then transformed into a one-page scrollytelling experience, a visual story of how attention moves through a day.
FINE ARTS
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Vibrations Forward
with Joël Vacheron, Angelo Benedetto, Olympe Boutaghane, Francis Baudevin
Based on archives and experiences associated with Vibrations (1991–2013), this research analyses how the magazine's textual, graphic and photographic content provides insight into the challenges of communicating about popular music today.
(Re-)Viewing Paik – 2025
with Patrick Keller, François Bovier, Erika Marthins
A comparative and practice-based study on the transformative effects at play in the digital and hybrid exhibition of a body of non-digital native artworks (some artworks by artist Nam June Paik serving as a mean of understanding).
FINE ARTS
FINE ARTS
MA CI
The Assembly of Writings
with Federico Nicolao
A collective exploration of the new relations between contemporary writing and artistic practice.
Design for Recycling through Automation and Robotics in Apparel Accessories and Footwear
with Maxwell Ashford
This project develops design for recycling textile-based goods, one of the most damaging waste streams, using contemporary toolsets to dismantle products into pure fractions.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Audio Reactive Festival Poster Series
with Talia Cotton
First-year students designed a series of audioreactive posters for a music festival. They utilized dynamic tools and live data input to explore sound-responsive visuals within social media's digital format, creating a cohesive and recognizable festival identity.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Lidia Molina González – Toilet Break Magazine
by Lidia Molina González
It all started with taking a break. A pause. A moment alone in a shared space: quiet, ordinary, a little strange. Toilets might not be the first place you’d look for big ideas, but that’s why we chose them. Toilet Break uses this overlooked space to explore how we live together, take space, and connect. This first issue is about in-betweens: between public and private, inside and outside. It gathers voices from Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, across generations and practices. A place where ideas circulate freely, where serious things can be said with a wink. A collective and personal space to test new editorial forms, listen more carefully, and believe in detours as a way forward. To take, quite literally, a moment to reflect and sit with things.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Flora Hayoz – FACE À FACE
by Flora Hayoz
FACE À FACE is an exploration of loneliness through two mediums: dance and graphic design. This project brings together two practices to give shape to a hybrid creation. On one hand, a choreographic piece co-choreographed with Gaia Menchini, centred on states of loneliness and then captured on video. The second medium is a publication that extends the piece. By questioning the book as an object, it is designed to be read by two people and becomes a tool for dialogue and listening. The publication thus diverts from its usual uses, creating a sensory experience. The two media interact with each other, inviting us to experience solitude both in movement and in the sharing of reading. Thus, FACE À FACE offers an experience where solitude becomes the starting point for an encounter.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Paul Paturel – Modulat – 2025 #2
by Paul Paturel
Grime Index is an interactive VJ-ing project that centralizes, visualizes, and enables navigation through iconic moments of grime — a chaotic genre born on London’s pirate airwaves. By turning audio data into visual identity and live signage, the project makes a performance-based, oral, and improvised culture more readable. Designed for both newcomers and longtime fans, it is built around three interchangeable modules — MC, instrumental, and lyrics — honoring the culture of sampling, MCing, and mixing. Diarization, transcription, dynamic typography, and real-time effects combine to reveal grime’s living and navigable memory.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Léa Corin – Neither Fully Free, Nor Fully Captive
by Léa Corin
Neither Fully Free, Nor Fully Captive explores the theme of day parole. Through a video installation and a book, this project archives and documents the activities of an association dedicated to reintegration. The projection, conceived as an emotional archive, combines experimental videos with sound testimonies from individuals on day parole supported by the association, revealing the complexity of this transition. The book, as a complement, adopts a documentary and sensitive approach, blending stories and visual creations. This project transcends graphic form to foster social dialogue and shed light on an essential yet often overlooked issue.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Marc Facchinetti – The Swiss Climate Report
by Marc Facchinetti
The Swiss Climate Report is an editorial design project that explores climate change through data. Based on recent meteorological records, put into perspective with historical averages sometimes dating back more than 150 years, the book is supported by plugins custom-developed for InDesign. These tools translate scientific data such as temperatures, UV radiation and Dobson units into typographic variations and ASCII forms. This experimental approach offers an alternative reading of climate information. The project offers a raw and precise computer graphics perspective.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Mathilde Driebold – Ce qu'il reste de nous
by Mathilde Driebold
This book exists for what remains of us—and perhaps, of you. Fragments of an intimate past inscribed in, and lost within, a social context that goes beyond us. This diploma project takes the form of an editorial narrative, blending personal stories and social archives. Through this work, I explore the traces left by addiction within a family setting, bringing individual and collective memory into dialogue. Ce qu'il reste de nous also demonstrates that graphic design can be used as a tool to question social realities, give shape to sensitive subjects, and break the silence.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Hugo Scholl – Modulat – 2025
by Hugo Scholl
MODULAT is a variable typeface designed around the concept of a musical visualizer. Starting from a neutral design, it branches out into multiple character sets, each allowing adaptation to different graphic and sonic worlds. Its variation axes enable it to adjust to a wide range of display formats, making it suitable for use across various digital platforms. Conceived as a modular tool, it questions how a typeface can accompany music while maintaining visual coherence. The project combines formal experimentation with a search for graphic adaptability.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Emilie Müller – Librarynth
by Emilie Müller
It is good to believe that the library is resilient. Not as a relic of the past, but as a presence that reinvents itself, oscillating between the tangible and the intangible. It's not a question of denying the digital, nor of clinging to our yellowed pages. But to understand that if we accept the library as a moving space, an organism that mutates with the times, then its future may not be so bleak. My diploma is a non-linear immersive library, conceived as a virtual house. Each piece evokes one of six themes from the Jan Michalski Foundation's Varia collection. In the form of a web interface, the project celebrates the serendipity inherent in physical libraries, while questioning how digital technology can translate the book experience.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Eliot Dubi – JUST IN CASE
by Eliot Dubi
At the individual level, we can neither predict nor prevent the next disaster; we can only arm ourselves with the right reflexes to face it. JUST IN CASE is a website that gathers, through four scenarios — large wildfires, dam failures, industrial accidents and earthquakes — the key actions to remember when everything turns upside down. A clear tree-like navigation, concise texts and flat-style illustrations keep learning accessible without resorting to sensationalism. A triptych of posters promotes the site to the wider public. Designed for a generation flooded with anxiety-fuelled alerts, the project turns worry into simple, immediate actions — just in case.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Coraline Beyeler – 5R
by Coraline Beyeler
5R is a documentary book explores the contrast between urban and rural agriculture, focusing on developments driven by new generations. It addresses issues related to pollution as well as social, health, and economic challenges.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Delphine Brantschen – What Remains to Be Stitched
by Delphine Brantschen
What Remains to Be Stitched is an interactive website shaped as a memory palace. Through her mother's oral accounts, the graphic designer weaves together Brazil's past into 3D icons and narrative fragments. No objects or images have been preserved from this life — only words. These words are my only inheritance. But what remains when even she no longer remembers them? Blending graphic design, modeling, point clouds and spatial storytelling, the project explores a poetic form of transmission, stitching memories to preserve a fragile link between memory, culture and identity.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Candice Aepli – Brindille et Azilise
by Candice Aepli
Brindille et Azilise invite you to imagine children's space differently, by offering a lively, playful universe in their bedrooms. Here, the story is not read between the pages, but lies on the floor and climbs up the windows. It slips under an arm. It tucks in dreams. It's a whole world at children's level, where ecosystems come to life through furniture, transforming everyday life into a playground for exploration. Le jardin, collection no. 1 The gardener has slipped seeds into the soil, the bright sun warms the petals, the mouse nibbles on the sly, and in this corner full of life, everyone is busy and smiling.
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”.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Cyprien Valenza – Patterna
by Cyprien Valenza
Patterna is an experimental variable typeface designed around two axes: Weight and Weaving. Inspired by Cassandre's Bifur from the 1930s and the arrangement of threads on Jacquard looms, Patterna is based on a rigorous grid that structures shapes and spacing. Its modular layering system allows for graphic experimentation with variations, making each composition dynamic. Numerous alternates reinforce its formal richness. Patterna challenges fashion conventions by offering a modular, dense typeface designed as both a graphic tool and a writing system.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Constance Mauler – Club Kid
by Constance Mauler
My project explores the Club Kid scene. Born in the 1980s in New York, this movement emerged as a radical response to artistic and social elitism. Led by queer and marginalized individuals, it transformed nightlife into a space of freedom, resistance, and self-invention. This publication aim to create a dialogue between the original generation of Club Kids and the contemporary scene, to show how this movement continues to challenge norms, invent new codes, and assert liberated identities. An immersion into a flamboyant and deeply political subculture.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Alfredo Venti – Points de rencontre/Treffpunkte
by Alfredo Venti
Points de rencontre/Treffpunkte is an inclusive graphic system designed to make sociocultural resources more visible and accessible to people facing linguistic isolation, or to anyone seeking to join a social network. Inspired by educational tools used with non-native speakers, it combines pictograms, color coding, visual keywords, and modular signage. Installed at the entrances of community centers through interchangeable panels, and complemented by poster campaigns (print and web), it brings these structures into public view for those looking for a service, a network, or simply a welcoming place.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Amélie Bertholet – a room of our own
by Amélie Bertholet
a room of our own is an editorial project born from the relationship between my flatmate, Flavia, and myself. This book explores how a relationship lives and evolves within a shared space: our apartment. Often seen as a transitional phase, cohabitation here becomes a long-term space of emancipation and sisterhood. Nurtured by feminist references—beginning with its title, borrowed from "A Room of One’s Own" by Virginia Woolf—the project questions the place of women within spaces of creation and intimacy. Through symmetry and collection, the book translates the experience of a lived space into an editorial object. The layout's grid, drawn from the apartment’s floor plan, creates shifts in scale and layout to reflect the transformation of 3D space into the 2D printed page.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mirielle Alina Rohr – Girls Manufactured
by Mirielle Alina Rohr
Girls Manufactured is a series of five ceramic vases, each representing a social media–driven aesthetic identity such as the Tradwife or Femme Fatale. These identities commodify femininity through strict visual and lifestyle codes that often lean towards conservative ideals and pleasing the male gaze. The photographer generated images with AI using datasets that I tied to each identity and integrated her own face to reflect her dual role as viewer and target scrolling through social media. The images I then transferred onto the vases using a technique that merges image and clay. The vases reference femininity through containment and decoration, while their form, based on Panathenaic amphorae, once awarded to male victors in ancient Greece, links ancient symbols of patriarchy to today's curated ideals.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Jose Martin Martinez – L’Eternité Reste
by Jose Martin Martinez
Briefly after leaving his country, the photographer met his first friends, Serhii and Yelyzaveta, two Ukrainian teenagers, and past lovers, forced to flee together the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Thus, a two year passage begun, with the trials and tribulations that come from love, death, war and solitude. L'Eternité Reste (Eternity Remains) is a documentation, at times abstract, at times literal, often cinematographic, of this story. An unapologetic coming of age story, released from the idealized, fantastic and vulgar narratives showcased in Hollywood and social media. This book functions as an "exchange currency" of sorts against the distorted social apparatus of "reality". Furthermore, the book, pretends to leave an indelible record of this "love story", inextricably linked to a contemporary historical conflict.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Nabarun Gogoi – The Swan
by Nabarun Gogoi
In this short film, the photographer used a CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) avatar to address and question contemporary notions of masculinity and the complex relationship it shares with love. Inspired by the photographer's own apprehensions related to connecting with other men, the short film uncovers the subtle yet forceful indoctrination of masculine perceptions of power and control. These perceptions clash vehemently with the vulnerability that comes with loving another and the emotions it evokes, thus condemning men to an internal prison of shame and self-betrayal. Created using a gaming engine, the film aims to confront this dilemma and hints at the need to adopt a more nuanced version of masculinity - one where the self is no longer compromised to cater to the insecurities of the many.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Riccardo Androni – Exhaustion
by Riccardo Androni
Exhaustion is a critical and ironic response to the performance-driven society the photographer inhabits — one that demands constant motion, visibility, and productivity. Through absurd and site-specific gestures in public spaces, he confronts machines of efficiency and elevation with deliberate resistance. The photographer climbs down an escalator, blocks a door with his head, bends to stay in frame. These futile acts follow a strict protocol and expose the tragic emptiness behind endless self-performance. With dry humor and physical endurance, Exhaustion seeks to unmask a system that rewards conformity and erases meaning — until all that remains is exhaustion.