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GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

PROJECTIONS XXL

with Sami Benhadj, Vincent Jacquier

An immersive and magnetic visual environment, created by ECAL students, illuminates the facades of the mudac and Photo Elysée building. As part of an interdisciplinary project within the Visual Communication department of ECAL, students in the Photography, Graphic Design and Media & Interaction Design Bachelors programs developed immersive video projects designed to adorn the facades of Photo Elysée.

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Gwendoline Albasini – Dear Kingdom

by Gwendoline Albasini

Dear Kingdom is a story told through storytelling. A fictional figure embodies the princess trapped in her role, the horse who frees her and the witch who casts a spell. These archetypes confront intimate questions about the female gender and seek to dismantle collective ideals. The dream castle, once we look beyond its ramparts, vanishes into thin air. The video immerses the viewer in a world as majestic as it is oppressive. The soundtrack consists of singing and violin. The sounds can be both powerful and frail, revealing the beauty of the disparities. “Dear Kingdom is an appeal to the projections of a social and personal ideal. In this message there is a desire to share my path in this imposing, theatrical and fanciful universe.“

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Noa Chevalley – Bêche pour dame

by Noa Chevalley

“In the middle of this gravel pit, a vast, artificial and monumental landscape, I try to leave my mark. In mimicry of this environment, I cut into the soil with the strength of my arms. The naked body becomes a tool for digging and filming. It is desexualised in this vain and infinite action. I use my strength to feel more powerful and to detach myself from the normative injunctions that are imposed to me. Despite this, I cannot compete with this place. A relentless battle takes place between the shovel and the ground – a battle that breaks the body and dismantles it. This work mirrors the feeling of inadequacy that comes from the dynamic of striving to meet the expectations that are imposed on us. I do not listen to my body anymore and I am conditioned to accept a world that rips it apart.“

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Dominique Bartels – The Threads That Hold the Earth Together

by Dominique Bartels

“Nostalgia for media that resonate with my body. The installation The Threads That Hold the Earth Together explores the plasticity of photographic and videographic image through weaving. Making and juxtaposing photographs is a way for me to create tangible links. The materiality, the body of the image are my starting point. To seize the passage of formlessness to form, I work with different media around linen: the first fabric to cover, clothe and preserve the human body. Three canvases, woven and unwoven with linen, photographic film and magnetic tape, are suspended in space. A video which explores the transformation of flax through different image textures runs in a loop on a TV.“

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Tony Altermatt – huǒlóng

by Tony Altermatt

“ Huǒlóng evokes the memories and feeling that we might get from a country we have never lived in. We explore then intertwine symbols and images, giving birth to our own culture. From East to West, I create my representation of the second generation of the Chinese diaspora. Silently built, two distinct landscapes merge. Our youth evolves, oscillating between two cultures. The osmosis is palpable, between traditional heritage and desire for emancipation. This fictional story is the fruit of a journey. The protagonists gather to exchange their views. We connect lands, objects and environments. This is our way of representing ethnic mixing: a poetic symphony, where boundaries are dissolved.“

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Diego Fellmann – Lopo

by Diego Fellmann

“This work focuses on the last fragments of memories of one of my relatives, Lopo. Initially destined for a political career, he decided to follow a different path. Leaving his family home with his savings, he journeyed through the deserts and salt flats of the Altiplano, seeking his own way. Several years later, my father found his trace in a hotel where they had recorded some songs that Lopo had composed, drawing inspiration from his journey. After that, he mysteriously disappeared and there is almost no trace of him left, except for these recordings. Using models and landscapes, I explore the flaws of memory and their volatile nature and attempt to recreate a portrait of him based on the rare and last memories that my father and mother have of him.“

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Camille Spiller – Smooth Space

with RVB Books/Matthieu Charon & Rémi Faucheux

« My work focuses on the construction of the city and addresses my own critical position within the extensive social fabric produced by the city. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space” — i.e., open, free-flowing, multidimensional — this work analyses and connects urbanisation processes in various West European cities. Fragments of prefabricated buildings, office blocks and streets aggregate chaotically. By further warping their aspect through the photographic lens their chaos is accentuated thus generating an atmosphere of doubt. Collage in post-production pushes distortion to the point of creating a conundrum between optical illusion and constructed reality.»

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Lisa Mazenauer – Copper Tales

by Lisa Mazenauer

What links embodied desires with the spirals of open-pit mines? Copper Tales is an installation that addresses mining operations through the sensitive bodies that are involved in it. Based on the site of the Rio Tinto mines (Spain) crossed by an acidic river, the project connects different actors participating in the extraction of raw materials. The – archaeological, geological, human, bacterial – traces marked on the grounds are projected together in a future narrative.

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Samara Krähenbühl – Il est passé tout à l'heure, il m'a dit de rien dire

by Samara Krähenbühl

« At the turning point of the transition to adulthood, childhood and its memories re-emerge more than ever. Through a short film at the edge of video art, I question how to overcome one’s traumas and reappropriate one’s life experiences and grey areas. Because of its dreamlike character, the film takes on a surrealist tone. Through visual metaphors and mental imagery, I exorcise an intimate and painful episode of my childhood.»

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Marvin Merkel – Kuh Vache Mucca

by Marvin Merkel

« Kuh Vache Mucca is an installation through which I question my relationship with Swiss national identity. Having neither passport, family or roots in Switzerland, I have never identified as a Swiss national. The images and sculptures that make up this project bear witness to my attempts at reconciliation with my homeland and its national identity. These clumsy or even failed attempts offer a new approach to national identity. They make the traditions, customs, figures and monuments that every citizen has learned to praise look comical and absurd and thus question their existence. Is it still necessary and legitimate nowadays to maintain a country’s national identity?»

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Ludivine Keller – Girovago sulla risacca cercandoti

by Ludivine Keller

« Girovago sulla risacca cercandoti is the story of a dreamlike wandering experience that I went through after the loss of a loved one. This project brings together several symbols that have become obsessive for me over the last few years, developing in a back-and-forth fashion like emotional backwash. It is the result of several trips to Italy, suspended moments and life-saving free dives. Water serves as a temporal bridge to the projections created by absence and a creatura-musa guides us through this world of dreams. The publication translates the ambivalent and fluctuating sensations of this wandering, while the collage-sculptures highlights this desire to recreate amalgams to fill a void.»

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Julie Corday – De taille d'une mandarine

by Julie Corday

« This is a physical and psychological trauma that took place in my childhood. At the age of 9, a stone the size of a tangerine hit my left eye. Today I am trying to reconnect the woman I am with the little girl who almost lost her sight 20 years ago through photography. Several surgeries and significant loss of vision gave rise to fears and anxieties of being blind or disfigured. By weaving links between my personal history, mental images and the perception of the world around me, I offer a story composed of my childhood words and visual metaphors to recount this accident.» - Julie Corday

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Florian Hilt – New Order

by Florian Hilt

« New Order generates a series of encounters and interactions between distant elements through multiple approaches in the visual, digital and installation fields. Through these exchanges, I reveal my secret nature: my impulses, fears and dreams. By exploring them as infinite spaces with multiple levels of information, past, present and future mix to reveal new assemblages. My collection is made of contrasted fragments: web archives and smartphone pictures, ancient-looking artefacts and video games. The installation acts as a chaotic self-portrait and allows viewers to choose their own path and question themselves. By linking the elements that compose it, each experience is the result of a new order.» - Florian Hilt

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Basil Pérot – As Long as You Wait

by Basil Pérot

This short film is about expressing our inability to come to terms with reality, especially during traumatic events. To reach this state of osmosis, we try to observe, feel, and listen as intensely as we can. This is how Pola’s character tries to grasp reality, as she slowly sinks into madness, between paranoia and identity crisis. The project appears as a transcription of Pola’s point of view and of the feelings she experiences. A book will compile Pola’s thoughts that she writes throughout the film in a burst of lucidity through which she tries to convince herself that what she is experiencing is real.

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Photographic revelation

with Laurence Bonvin

Stammering This involves taking an idea, a project in progress or a project that has already been completed but not satisfactorily, and pushing it further, both from a conceptual and/or aesthetic point of view, as well as from a production point of view. To experience what can be improved in a project compared to a first realisation. Revisiting a classic. It is also about testing ideas, taking risks, pushing a process further, experimenting.

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Photographic Editions

with RVB Books/Matthieu Charon & Rémi Faucheux

Starting from the premise that the book constitutes both an alternative practice to the exhibition and an alternative exhibition practice - alternative exhibition practices insofar as the book and the printed word are essentially modes of visibility of art; alternative practices to the exhibition because this means of visibility is very different from what is usually called an exhibition - we consider the book to be the medium that is perfectly suited to soon-to-be-graduated photographers.

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Photographie et Art plastiques

with Natacha Lesueur

Based on projects around a common theme, the students develop a personal and in-depth work over the entire semester. The project must be developed, clarified, modified if necessary, and enriched throughout the semester, as the students conduct research, reflections, and experiments, and as they consult with the professor. During these regular consultations, the students address the various aspects related to the conception, production and realization of a photographic work...

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Steven Rüthy – Insight

by Steven Rüthy

« Do we still see everything that happens around us ? Insight is a short film set in an architectural social housing complex in Bümpliz-Bern, which offers a unique perspective of the world as viewed by an elderly couple living in the Holenacker district on the outskirts of the Swiss capital. In this project I confront the viewer with a way of life which for us as visual artists and most likely for many others, is unimaginable. I question the spatial notion of a secure/safe space and how it is used and therefore perceived from an external point of view, my own. Insight therefore consists of stepping into the shoes of someone who has blurred vision, understanding what it is like and how it affects the way you live.»

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David Benito Py – Pigeons, They Make Up the Beehive

by David Benito Py

« Every city is the unique work of its inhabitants and, paradoxically, it concerns every one of them in a different way. In my opinion, in order to solve the apparent contradiction between intimacy and urbanity, the appropriation of space, both material and mental, is necessary. Only then can urban wandering be experienced as a real sensory experience. Through this installation, I invite visitors to live my personal experience of space, horizontal and vertical, contemplative and obsessive. As Jean-Christophe Bailly put it, “Each city has its own slang and has, within itself, a clandestine city that pierces it in scattered meshes whose bare thread the stroller puts back together.”»

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Emeline Courcier – Sous les Cendres du Mekong

by Emeline Courcier

« Sous les cendres du Mekong is a film that questions the coexistence of opposed traditions and cultures, life and death, and the confrontation between history and individual stories. Against the backdrop of the health crisis and anti-Asian racism, family ties are revealed through conversations questioning my place as a Viet Kieu daughter and my lineage. Through our beliefs in reincarnation, I project myself onto a familiar yet foreign figure: my mother’s cousin, who drowned in the Mekong, creating a link between past and present, war and peace, words and silence. It is through traumatic memory and psychological heritage that the after-effects of a war from which my family escaped reach me, taking precedence in my dreams and my mind.»

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Axelle Bruniau – Leughenaer

by Axelle Bruniau

« Leughenaer is an autobiographical fiction about my relationship to my childhood in a particular geography and culture – Dunkirk – a city in the north of France. This film refers particularly to my non-binarity and transfemininity in a social context where carnival culture and cross-dressing are an important part of life for three months a year. The architecture of the city of Dunkirk is of particular interest to me because of the parallel I can draw with my own person. This city was 90% destroyed during World War II and was quickly rebuilt into a modern city. Deconstructing in order to reconstruct, that is how I went back to make this film.»

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Antoine Martin – Via Alpina

by Antoine Martin

Swiss iconography presents the mountains under two ambivalent aspects: on the one hand, a hostile and dangerous environment, and on the other hand, an environment tamed and dominated by humankind. The interesting aspect of this project is that it transposes certain characteristic images from this iconography and leads viewers to question the boundary between stereotypes and the reality in which they live. It also questions the use of mountains as an «artefact» conveyed by commercial clichés. Viewers are led to get involved physically with the image by immersing themselves in the relief of this alpine imaginary, forced to observe the paradox of its symbolic and monumental reduction through commercial imagery.

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Jenna Callewaert – Her and I

by Jenna Callewaert

« What do you do when you miss everything? How do you avoid being haunted by the place you left? A painful absence mixed with hope, nostalgia that associates past and future, like a paradox. Above all, this project is a quest: that of finding a part of myself in a country where I once lived, and whose only memories I had were of colours, smells and sensations. Throughout my journey, I sought to explore and confront these memories built on a form of absence. Between dismay and delight, I often asked myself the question of the integrity of these images. Were these memories real or pure fabrications of the mind? I thus designed this book with the aim of capturing a process of transformation where each image, composed of sepia, shadows and ochre, carries in its flesh the testimonies of the past and illustrates that nothing ever dies.»

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Clara Roumégoux – Territoires du geste

by Clara Roumégoux

The video Territoires du geste features portraits of women of different generations living in France with a dual cultural identity. From gesture to speech, the question of transmission emerges thanks to a modest mechanism, where material and immaterial dimensions meet between stories and culinary activities. How does the gesture become a symbol of silent resistance? The kitchen stages the political elements that history reveals. From couscous to meatballs, ma’amoul and Turkish coffee, these foodstuffs of historical and cultural heritage bring us back to the resulting spiritual heritage. The movement of the hands sets the stage for the political elements that their words weave, right down to the psyche of dreams and fears.

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Justine Willa – Where Are the Exits up There?

by Justine Willa

«In the summer of 2021, Asclepios, a scientific association, organised a mission in the Swiss Alps, simulating life on a celestial body other than Earth. Confined for ten days in tunnels 450 metres below the ground, six “astronauts” transformed this hideout into an otherworldly place and modelled their daily life on the rhythm of life in space. This retro-futuristic scenario, seen in scientific circles and science fiction, questions reality, the projection of reality and the resulting image. Based on their mission, my project transcribes the fantasy of space exploration through immersion, mixing the reality of the situation with artificial images, and questions our place in the universe and our role in the future of humanity.»

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Alizée Quinche – They Blossom at Night

by Alizée Quinche

« They Blossom at Night explores the vision of a shifting biotechnological intimacy, the opening to an altered state of consciousness towards an undefined space, a moment in time when the connection between bodies becomes fluid(s), a form of sexuality where each partner, each relationship, transforms and helps beings evolve through sharing and emancipation. Featuring an immersive video-sound installation, the project appropriates the symbolic force of procreation. It explores the materiality of non-reproductive sexuality by developing a microbiological creature that represents the transmissions of polyamorous intimacy. The work expresses the cohesion between the organicity of relationships and a form of technology that allows for different social liberations, in reference to medically assisted procreation.»

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Sarah Koeke – Can We Always Be This Close

by Sarah Koeke

« Over the past ten years, thanks to video streaming sites, K-Pop has become a global phenomenon, completely reshaping the relationship between the music industry and the image. K-pop stars, also known as idols, have become symbols of globalisation and the cultural power of South Korea and are asserting themselves as role models for many young people in the West. Can We Always Be This Close paints a complex picture of the links between image, identity, masculinity and fan culture. Through their social networks, young fans construct their identity online. The content produced seems superficial and narcissistic, but highlights essential topics such as gender normativity, social relationships or ethnic issues.»

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Sofia Papaefthymiou – Το Ρόδι – The Pomegranate

by Sofia Papaefthymiou

« Being half-Cypriot half-Swiss, I somehow felt the need to understand my relationship to the territory, borders, exile and my shared origins. Το Ρόδι–The Pomegranate is a short film that has become a tool for exploration and deconstruction, bringing the geopolitical conflicts of my country up to the level of my own conflicts. This project is also a space where I can dream freely of other places, my own island – the reflections of my desires. Unable to reach this homeland, I try to grasp what I do not have, to reproduce the sensations that I experienced there. I collect archives, I commission images. I bring my female body, which I appropriate and re-appropriate through various representations, back to its origin, to find my place and speak up again.»

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Caroline Perrenoud – Entre-deux, il n'y a pas rien

by Caroline Perrenoud

There is a space between what we call reality and virtual reality, which by definition is unreal. In this in-between space, full of possibilities, identities are created and emancipated. Sexualities are discovered and avatars are roles that we choose to embody. These roles are manifold and represent the multiplicity of the self. Women in their plurality, dissidents, the in-between space enables us to show ourselves, to observe each other, to make ourselves powerful and claim our place and freedom. Through self-sexualisation, the monetisation of the self-image, sexual or romantic relationships, the avatars evolve seamlessly and transform. They decide, take over the space and meet in an immersive video installation.