PHOTOGRAPHY
Frontiere di Sabbia
with Florian Amoser, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
"Frontiere di Sabbia" is an exhibition of the students of the Master of Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, in collaboration with the Biennale dell’Immagine di Chiasso. The collection of projects you will see has been created with drones: aircraft originally developed for warfare that have been transformed into civilian and popular forms. In just a few years, these devices have undergone a dizzying technological evolution and achieved considerable commercial success. Used for a variety of purposes - recreational and professional, political and subversive - these “unmanned aerial vehicles” can be easily purchased and controlled remotely, like in a video game. The opportunities offered by civilian drones combine with multiple negative consequences: the confusion between reality and simulation, privacy violations, and the use for illegal and violent actions. From a photographic perspective, drones offer infinite viewpoints for exceptional, vertical, and total vision. Equipped with all-round sensors, they fly autonomously on programmed routes and are able to monitor the territory and its inhabitants. The “Frontiere di Sabbia” exhibition, presented in the Ex Saceba building, a cement factory located a few kilometers from the border, recalls the past of these places where materials were produced to build houses, bridges, and highways, but also walls and barriers. By diverting from predetermined and automated paths, a new generation of image creators questions us about our perception of our limits: human, political, and technological.
