PHOTOGRAPHY
Workshop Survival Camp
with Thomas Mailaender
During this workshop, the artist and the second-year Bachelor students spent a week living in a forest in western Lausanne. The shock of being deprived of the usual comforts such as running water, electricity and heating motivated the students to produce an enormous quantity of images. Cooking over an open fire, sleeping under the stars, hunting and fishing were all part of their daily lives, and provided the perfect backdrop for visual experimentation. The responses were manifold, from still to moving images, some dealing directly with delirious contemporary camping. The common denominators of all the works are humor and off-beatness. During Paris Photo, the results are presented in the form of an installation in the unusual urban setting of Les Voûtes. After the week-long workshop in Switzerland, all the students worked with Thomas Mailaender on the design and production of the exhibition. The students experienced a week of installation in total immersion: they lived in the exhibition as they built it. The images are presented in a raw environment, a sort of village, a makeshift camp. This whole process enabled them to confront not only the shooting process, but also the question of producing and exhibiting the images to the public. The exhibition is accompanied by a two-color catalogue-journal produced by the students and printed at the ECAL.
