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Jeansdinge Moving On
Originally, in the early 2000s, Jeansdinge was a collection of denim objects brought together by artist-researchers Katharina Hohmann and Katharina Tietze for an exhibition exploring the grey areas between art and fashion, set in a former East…
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Forms of Artists' Lives
Entretien avec Mathilde Chénin
Looking to escape the model of temporarily occupying a wasteland proposed by institutions and private companies, art collectives are rethinking how to live and work together by acquiring land that will ensure the sustainability of their action. In her…
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In Touch with History
Interview with Pierre Leguillon about the Digital Version of his Book "Oracles"
The collector′s book, Oracles – Artists' Calling Cards, reinvents itself in digital format and reaches out to a wider audience. In this interview, Pierre Leguillon, the instigator of this multi-faceted project under the aegis of his Museum of…
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When Someone Speaks to You, You Just Smile
Two films by Lou Cohen explore the contemporary professional world with a wry sense of humour. From recruitment agencies to start-ups, Cohen imagines situations in which coaching and power relations combine and clash at the expense of workers.
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Automation: For or Against Designers?
A graphic designer and teacher who has long been interested in interactivity issues, Etienne Mineur is experimenting with artificial intelligence image generation platforms, such as DALL-E or Midjourney, to create typography. Testing the limits of…
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Learning about the World with Painting
Interview with Nicolas Chardon
For his painting, French artist Nicolas Chardon uses excessively limited means: simple geometric forms, preferably a square; sometimes a tautological expression such as "abstract painting"; white and black as dominant colours. Yet his work is far from…
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Crunchy Packaging
Chocolate, Swiss Winter Relief, Nightclub: External Mandates in Visual Communication
Favarger is a Geneva-based chocolate brand founded in 1826, well known for its avelines, a chocolate praline wrapped in gold paper. In 2021, the company commissioned the Visual Communication Department of HEAD – Genève to develop a new visual identity…
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Transition du regard
An Interview with river, Filmmaker and Trans Activist
Whether working behind the camera, in casting studios, nightclubs, or on a football field, river is methodically helping trans and queer people gain visibility. For a long time, the film industry’s conservative structures only ever imagined the stories…
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The Curator in the Courtyard with a Wrench
Interview with Roxane Bovet
Autonomous activities with their own peculiar rules and devoid of any identifiable utility, play and art have regularly met and entwined throughout history, particularly in the subversive project of the Situationist International. As the world and its…
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Dossier #13
Theses of today and tomorrow
It is now an established tradition: every two years, before summer, ISSUE publishes a selection of exemplary theses produced within the school's various Master's programmes[note]In Visual Arts: CCC, TRANS, Work.Master, and in Design: Interior…
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Text and drawing's «confrontention»
Vanishing flower pots that herald a world in decay, the death of a tombstone cutter that leaves a great void, and a nightmarish birthday surprise in the open country. These stories, imagined by three students in their second year of a Bachelor's degree in…
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Dossier #12
De/Production Without Cons/Des/Truction
After a dream in which an extraterrestrial intelligence warned them that the planetary ecosystem was collapsing, the situationist artist and electronic musician Chris Korda founded their ‘religious’ Church of Euthanasia movement in 1992, which they…
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Jouer à être humain
An Interview with Sylvie Boisseau, Frank Westermeyer and David Zerbib
Sylvie Boisseau, Frank Westermeyer and David Zerbib publish the ebook Jouer à être humain (Playing at being human), the result of a two-year research project (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) which brings together video experimentation and philosophical…
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Autopsy of an Editorial Experiment
HEAD – Publishing's Multi-Platform Books Collection Manifestes
The HEAD – Genève’s policy is to defend access to the knowledge it produces. To this end, the HEAD launched a new multi-media editorial unit called HEAD – Publishing, whose first collection, Manifestes, brings together short, incisive theoretical texts…
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Dossier #10
The Controversial Institutionalisation of Artistic Research: Comments on the Vienna Declaration
In June 2020, European umbrella organisations for higher-art education came together to produce a document called the Vienna…
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Principles for an Open-Ended Artistic Research
Statements by Anthony Masure and Doreen Mende
As a member of one of the signatory umbrella organizations of the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research – the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) – the HEAD – Genève is indirectly linked…
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Inside the Box
An Interview with Morag Keil about Remote Art Teaching and Making
Through videos, immersive installations and drawings, Morag Keil looks with disillusioned humour at the impact of what Shoshana Zuboff famously called surveillance capitalism. The multiple lockdowns and calls to telecommute during the Covid-19 pandemic…
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The Joy of Writing and Rewriting
An Interview with Carla Demierre and Fabienne Radi
While remote teaching has momentarily transformed their common creative writing course into a podcast, Fabienne Radi and Carla Demierre nonetheless advocate for experiential learning: the experience of reading, writing and rewriting beyond the clichés…
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Une lunch box dans la fable
Review of Fabienne Radi's Le déclin du professeur de tennis
Fabienne Radi published two books in 2020: Émail diamant at Art&fiction and Le déclin du professeur de tennis at Sombres torrents. Sylvain Menétrey focuses on the latter, a collection of four short stories written by Radi and…
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Head Voices VI – Dora Garcia
A Conference Selected in the School's Archives
This new episode in the Head voices section, which revisits notable conferences held at the HEAD – Genève in a relatively distant past, gives the floor back to the artist Dora Garcia. On May 9th, 2012, Garcia was the guest of a Talking…
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Head to Head VI – Doreen Mende
Video Profile of the CCC Research-Based Programme HEAD Professor
Head to head is a series of filmed portraits of teachers, researchers, artists and designers active at the HEAD – Genève. The portraits allow them to speak about their often brilliant careers outside the school. For this new edition, Doreen Mende, head…
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Memories of a Grand Tour – Episode 2
An Interview with Henrique Loja
We continue with our memories of the Grand Tour with Work.Master graduate student Henrique Loja’s sculpture work. Loja presented a series of objects partly composed of recycled materials, in which micro-stories and the planet’s geological history mix.…
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Memories of a Grand Tour – Episode I
An Interview with Giulia Essyad
On September 8th 2020, the Visual Art Department organised its traditional graduation exhibition, the Grand Tour. There’s nothing ordinary about this year’s exhibition though, which was planned for early summer, but was rescheduled to the start of the…
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La maille anticapitaliste
Interview with Valentine Ebner, Head of the KnitGeekResearch Project
Historically, the clothing industry has often been in the vanguard of great economic rationalisation movements. It was one of the first industries to be industrialised in the 19th century, and in the second half of the 20th century was one of the first…
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Introduction – Le mémoire, une formation intellectuelle et sensible
An interview with Lysianne Léchot Hirt and Anthony Masure
Each year, the Master’s theses produced at the HEAD – Genève bear witness to great thematic, methodological and formal wealth. As mentioned by Lysianne Léchot Hirt and Anthony Masure (respectively head of education coordination and head of research at…
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Design viral : méthodologies pour un buzz citoyen
An Interview with Artist-Researcher Caroline Bernard
In this interview, Caroline Bernard returns to some practical experiments she conducted with colleagues for the research project “Design viral: méthodologies pour un buzz citoyen.” From an attempt at a “self heroisation,” to spreading rumours and…
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Guinea pigs assemblages
Réflexions de Sylvain Menétrey sur la pratique d'Eva Zornio aka Affective Evaluation
Since 2018, artist and Work.Master graduate Eva Zornio has been developing a series of participative projects under the label Affective Evaluation, where she asks the audience to consider the question of empathy. In this text, Sylvain Menétrey postulates…
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Dossier #2
Common Denominator: Art in the Ruins of Modernity
In William Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840), sublime, unrelenting nature meets the revolting behaviour of men treating other men as refundable commodities. Images of black bodies at sea echo…
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Water policy and poetics
A conversation with Aurélien Gamboni, Jean-Pierre Greff and Daniel de Roulet
Source of life or the « armed wing » of migration policies; object of contemplation for painters and object of fears for islanders; static or furious element, deceptive metaphor for commercial exchanges and the digital; water circulates between poiesis,…
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Head to Head I – Charlotte Laubard
On the run up to the Venice Biennale 2019, Sylvain Menétrey sat down with Charlotte Laubard, the curator of the Biennale’s Swiss Pavillon and the head of the HEAD’s Visual Arts’ department. The interview evokes the political dimension of Laubard’s…