What if there were a Bechdel test equivalent for the representation of animals in works of fiction? French-speaking Swiss comic book author Fanny Vaucher makes a proposal in this direction.

La saturation médiatique, au niveau de la consommation comme de la production, fait surgir des questions inédites sur les relations non humaines, y compris avec nos très chers amis à poil. Les animaux de compagnie occupent la majeure partie de notre flux de médias sociaux, mais très peu de notre attention intellectuelle. Dans cet essai, Javier Fernández Contreras se penche sur leur histoire au sein de la vie domestique.

Instead of situating interior architecture as an all-encompassing field that designs the domestic cohabitation of animals and humans, the workshop given by architect, curator and scholar Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco for students of the Master of Arts in Interior Architecture at HEAD – Geneva used this discipline to critically examine the validity of this historical phenomenon from a material and spatial perspective. Moving away from the notion of a “pet” – questioned by new theoretical approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans – the workshop aimed to identify the traditional role that interior design plays in animal domestication within home interiors. Its ultimate goal is to envision non-hierarchical relations that diverge from the imposition of human-centric materials and spatial domestic standards onto other species.

Students collectively worked as a research unit on a graphic publication to be presented at the end of the workshop. After reading several key texts from fields such as the history of science, biology, and philosophy, they mapped out current discussions regarding the presence of animals in domestic spaces through clippings from general printed and online media written in the languages each student speaks. This included new legal frameworks, political polemics, the transformation of the home, the design of new architectural artifacts, etc. As a means of making the workshop’s discussions public, students’ ongoing research is published in ISSUE.

Why use the Bechdel test model to assess the representation of animals in works of fiction? Julie Enckell speaks with HEAD – Geneva alumna and illustrator Fanny Vaucher about the SIMBA test she developed in 2024, at the intersection of her artistic practice and her anti-speciesist activism.

What are books for? What role should they play in an art and design curriculum? How does fiction inform critical writing—or is it the other way around? And, for that matter, how does the form of a book enhance the meaning of its content? The Lundis-Livres ​​​​​​​podcast shares unique moments of conversation with figures from the fields of art and design, whose publications enrich and advance creative practice.

What are books for? What role should they play in an art and design curriculum? How does fiction inform critical writing—or is it the other way around? And, for that matter, how does the form of a book enhance the meaning of its content? The Lundis-Livres podcast shares unique moments of conversation with figures from the fields of art and design, whose publications enrich and advance creative practice.

What are books for? What role should they play in an art and design curriculum? How does fiction inform critical writing—or is it the other way around? And, for that matter, how does the form of a book enhance the meaning of its content? The Lundis-Livres podcast shares unique moments of conversation with figures from the fields of art and design, whose publications enrich and advance creative practice.

What are books for? What role should they play in an art and design curriculum? How does fiction inform critical writing—or is it the other way around? And, for that matter, how does the form of a book enhance the meaning of its content? The Lundis-Livres ​​​​​​​podcast shares unique moments of conversation with figures from the fields of art and design, whose publications enrich and advance creative practice.

The artist Chris Vargas is the founder and self-appointed director of The Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), a conceptual museum forever “under construction.” His outstanding work has inspired an ongoing research and teaching project on trans art history at the HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), supervised by Clovis Maillet with the participation of Ruby Faure and Jay Jordan, and supported by the Centre Maurice Chalumeau en Sciences des Sexualités (UNIGE).

In 2023, the MOTHA co-published Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, a compelling exploration of trans art, activism, and resistance with contributions from many scholars and artists including Riley Snorton, Vaginal Davis, Jeanne Vaccaro, and Leah DeVun. Spanning over four centuries, this volume brings together a wide-ranging selection of artworks and artifacts that highlights the under-recognized histories of trans and gender-nonconforming communities in order to reflect on historical erasure and imagine trans futures.

In his talk introduced by Clovis Maillet, Chris Vargas presents his research and discusses with moderator Ruby Faure and the audience.

What are books for? What role should they play in an art and design curriculum? How does fiction inform critical writing—or is it the other way around? And, for that matter, how does the form of a book enhance the meaning of its content? The Lundis-Livres podcast shares unique moments of conversation with figures from the fields of art and design, whose publications enrich and advance creative practice.

This article pays tribute to Nicolas Nova (1977-2024), a professor at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), who died during a trek in the Sultanate of Oman. A pioneer in studies that combined design, social sciences, and technology, this unclassifiable researcher explored the imaginaries, interstices, and paradoxes of digital objects, examining the tensions between industrial standardization and situated reappropriations. Co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, he renewed technological narratives through the practice of “design fiction.” An inspiring teacher, he taught his students an ethnographic perspective, transforming the observation of everyday life into a lever for creation. The care given to the form of his works embodied his conviction to build bridges between academic research, design practices, and civil society. With some twenty books to his name, Nicolas Nova leaves behind a multifaceted body of work. His absence deprives technological criticism of an essential, lucid, curious, and poetic voice.

The introductory text to A Show of Hands – which is shared below in its French version – raises the question of the relationship between art and craft. From a historical perspective, it is clear that the emergence of the notion of art in the West was contingent upon its separation from craft. In a colonial context, this disjunction made it above all possible to deny the practices of a colonised people the possibility of attaining the status of works of art. The essays in A Show of Hands shed a completely different light on making handiworks and craft.

To mark the publication of A Show of Hands. Crafting Concepts in Contemporary Art (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2025), Anthony Masure sits down with Ileana Parvu, the book's editor, and Nadia Radwan, author of a chapter of the book. Parvu contextualises the research project behind A Show of Hands, while Radwan highlights the political issues at stake in her decentred, decolonial analysis of craft in contemporary art.

The Collective Tools Project focuses on group dynamics. What are the methods that can help a collective function? How can each person find their place, exchange ideas, and be able to harmoniously share their expertise? These are the questions that the La Colle collective asked itself as part of a research project jointly supported by La Manufacture – Haute école des arts de la scène, the Yan Duyvendak company, and HEAD – Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HES-SO).

Florence Marguerat carried out a survey of alumni and teachers of the HEAD’s Visual Communication department to discuss the revival of craft practices in design at a time when digital technology is playing an increasingly important role in the creative professions, raising questions about the impact of artificial intelligence.

The podcast captures the essence of a conversation that we had with Polish-born artist Marysia Lewandowska in November 2023, at her studio in London. This conversation is the starting point and matrix of the research project In Their Own Words. While tracing her trajectory as an artist from the Eastern Bloc to capitalist England, Marysia Lewandowska discusses how her use of the audio recorder allowed her to connect with the Western art world. From this experience was born her "self-instituted" project, the Women's Audio Archive, an archive of over 120 hours of recordings that has now been digitized. What is the role of an artist's conversation and what status does art history give it? How should it be disseminated? Should it be archived? Should it be edited and, if so, to what extent? This podcast brings together the essential methodological questions raised by this discussion conducted from a feminist perspective.

In the late 1980s, because they knew and trusted each other, Nazli Madkour, an Egyptian artist active in the cultural scene, and Nawal El Saadawi, a psychiatrist, writer and feminist political activist, agreed to publish a book that revisited and shed light on the role of women artists in Egypt. The book was published in 1989 under the title Egyptian Women and Artistic Creativity [المرأة المصريةوالإبداع الفني]. In 1991, the Egyptian government's State Information Service commissioned an English edition, entitled Women and Art in Egypt. In an interview with Olivia Alexandra Fahmy, Nazli Madkour looks back on the history of these two books.

In this essay, the two authors discuss feminist methodologies of the visual arts interview. Adopting the interview to obtain information on women’s experience of art means focusing research on the terms of conversation and language. From this approach comes a critical reflection on the dimension of exclusion in the vocabulary used, which does not have the same meaning depending on who is speaking. If the interview belongs to the category of artists’ writings for criticism and the history of contemporary art, the feminist approach places more emphasis on the voice and the act of talking.

In this article, Aude Fellay examines critiques of work in fashion, and of work more broadly, in the light of the concept of 'the refusal of work', and the call for it, as formulated by the American researcher and anti-work activist Kathi Weeks in The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011). While critiques of work in fashion have so far produced reformist impulses, some of which they claimed for themselves, Weeks' conceptual framework of postwork imaginaries allows for a more radical impulse, and, on the horizon, a more desirable world.

This article is part of the @fashion_colloquialism research project led by Aude Fellay and Émilie Meldem at HEAD - Geneva (HES-SO).

This contribution explores the reality of trans children's lives, the social contexts in which they evolve, their games and their emotions; but also trans children's struggles, the strategies and spaces of autonomy they deploy to cope with the multiple violences they experience.

The 13th century in the West gave rise to the legendary tale of a parturient pope, that of the popess Joan. Although this story is at the heart of a rich literary, iconographic and historiographic production, from the 13th century to the present day, it has only been considered through the reading grid of a single possibility until now, the cis possibility, that of the sole congruence with her assigned sex: Jeanne, a woman, disguises herself as another, as a man, and in so doing, cross-dresses and hides. This possibility alone does little to account for the range of medieval possibilities: Joan is also John, and John himself is possibly a trans man.

This talk presents the provisional results of a research currently being carried out as part of a PhD on mobilizations for the health of trans people in France, from the late 1970s to the late 2010s.

In Black On Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton examines American trans historiography through the prism of racial issues: how do gender and race interfere and intertwine in trans and black lives? How do concepts such as that of passing and gender fugitivity circulate between the lives that stand on the edge of the American slave-racist world as well as those that stand on the edge of patriarchy and cissexism? ISSUE features a chapter from Snorton's book in a new and previously unpublished translation by Mabeuko Oberty.

Could we learn to grieve without fetishizing our dead (human or more-than-human)? Could we spend more time with our dead without making them into “steps” in the advancement of other causes?

This contribution is the starting point of the research called « Élaborer le bruit. Les identités en traduction », which Ève-Gabriel Chabanon is conducting as part of a practice-based doctoral thesis in art, registered simultaneously at the Villa Arson in Nice and at the University Paris Cité. It explores the work of the poet Justin Chin, and its possible translations.

In this paper, Liz Escalle-Dyachenko discusses three pieces for strings from the 2010s by three trans and non-binary composers of contemporary music based in the United States.

This talk focuses on how nonbinary, as an analytic, becomes a portal for rethinking dominant conceptions of temporality, territory, and form within and across social difference. Beginning with literary and media depictions of the Green Swamp and Honey Island Swamp monsters—swamp tales that bring the 18^th and 19^th century into the contemporary moment—this talk highlights the monstrosity of fugitivity.

Imagine yourself in a photography museum.  

Can we make trans history before the emergence of first-person narratives, and before the very conceptualization of trans issues? The hypothesis this paper develops is that the study of premodern gender transitions can teach us other ways of looking at gender that complicate our current perception, and open up perspectives for future trans people.

Invisibilisation, erasure, dispossession; numerous are the forms of incompleteness affecting trans* archives. Writing a compensatory or reparative trans* history often proves to be the solution. However, other archival strategies and practices – such as resynchronising bodies with archives (the living archive) and leveraging the iterability of archives – open up a space for freedom and encounter in archives that is proportional to the ever so great desire that archives arise in us.

In this contribution, Nayansaku Mufwankolo discusses their writing practice, autofiction afrocosmic poetry, and reads one of their poem.

Trans history grows in the interstices and in-betweens of institutions, disciplines and countries. It appears as an intellectual space that blends a great diversity of forms of writing, materials, contexts, and positions. The programme of this conference bears witness to this undisciplined richness, bringing together art history, political history, militant and community history, mediaeval and contemporary history, black and decolonial theories, and thinking on archives and creative research.

Over the past decade and more, the term “research-creation” has gained increasing traction as a descriptor for work that combines conventional scholarly inquiry with experimental, art-based practices. Some commentators have heralded research-creation as nothing short of a rebirth for academia. Others, meanwhile, have denounced it as a pseudo-artistic and pseudo-scientific sham. Yet doctoral theses that adopt this approach are beginning to reach the defense stage in significant numbers. What do these defenses tell us? And what do they say about research in the Anthropocene epoch?

The cinema department at HEAD – Geneva invited Khalik Allah to give a workshop during the “Semaine de tous les possibles” in February 2024. A renowned filmmaker and photographer (see his biography on the cinema department’s website), Allah is also a warmhearted communicator, someone who cares about sharing his process and thoughts with audiences and students. We talked with him about his artistic work and the workshop he gave to students from different departments.

The Si (1-bit computer) project, created by Raphaëlle Kerbrat at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs as part of her PhD thesis entitled, ‘Le poids des données, paradoxes matériels et sensibles du numérique’ (‘The weight of data, material and sensitive paradoxes of digital technology’), offers to make the physical imprint of a computational process discernible. Si (1-bit computer) is based on the physical decomposition of a binary system and draws on the manipulation of silicon, a semiconductor material used to make transistors, which are at the core of digital electronics. Si (1-bit computer) operates by enlarging physical and temporal scales, stretching a logical operation over several seconds and amplifying the initial size of the components. Matter is a central element in this project, which reveals the workings of our digital devices in a way that is at once archaic and poetic.

This contribution looks at digital technology through the prism of waste and waste’s potential. The contribution is based on a case study from an ethnographic survey that Bloch has been conducting with Thibault Le Page and Nicolas Nova since 2022 at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO). One of the survey’s aims is to highlight the various forms of reappropriation and transformation that can be achieved with elements from digital equipment such as smartphones, computers, headphones, connected objects, etc., or with their components.

From the seminal “cloud” metaphor to green buttons and blue thumbs-up emojis, our interactions and dominant discourses around the digital embody a specific capitalistic agenda: the one of technology as a commodity fetishism we simply consume and later trash without understanding how it operates. In addition, these interfaces and metaphors hide the complex human, material and environmental assemblages enabling, operating and optimising our digital processes. Drawing from this context, the article is intended for artists and interaction designers interested to critically engage with technology and their “blackboxes”. It argues for the importance of bridging design with social sciences and ethnographic fieldwork. Through this lens, it posits that designers can, first, better understand the lifecycle and infrastructures of our electronic objects as well as, second, create artefacts that nuance and critique these dominant narratives and beliefs around digital “immateriality”.

This video by Mabe Bethônico, edited in collaboration with Victor Galvão, who also created its sound, derives from a text constructed using a cut-up technique on an article by Lee Mackinnon titled "Technologies of Romance: Mineralogy: a digital account," published in the Science Museum Group Journal, 2019. The textual parts in the video are elusive, rhythmically relating to the work environment of extractive sites from which the main minerals used in our electronic devices are sourced, as well as to the large sales floors of digital appliances. Images were taken in Minas Gerais and Switzerland by Mabe Bethônico, but the video also includes content from her project "Museum of Public Concerns," a visual archive compiled from multiple sources and contributors. These include a firefighter’s report, evaluating the Brumadinho disaster, images made by members of the Maxakali community from Minas Gerais, and photos made by inspectors from the Brazilian Ministry of Labour and Employment, among others. The narrative invites to reflect on the environmental and social ramifications of technological dependencies, reminding of the costs of convenience and innovation.

Today there is a plane on which the battle of images is raging, an infra-iconic plane on which the fate of images and of those who look at them – but also of the things that look at them, non-human entities of artificial vision – is largely determined. This is the plane of computational technological infrastructures, and the norms that determine their operation: the plane of the coding of reality into information, of the digitisation and storage of data. It is in technology – the dual place of both material infrastructure and computer code – that the fate of our freedoms and our imaginations, and that of images with them, hangs in the balance.

One-third of the global tin supply is extracted from Bangka island in Indonesia. Tin is the most impacted mineral by the upcoming technological development, which includes artificial intelligence and technology for renewable energy. Natasha is a solar-powered A.I. voice, and in Kasiterit, a short film by Riar Rizaldi, they trace their genealogy and the truth of their origin; from the capital liquidity to labour dynamic. With their feminised voice—as quite often performed by other AI-powered voice assistants produced by tech-companies, Natasha narrates the emergence of tin in Bangka island and their existence from the perspective of tropical anthropology of nature, value theory, philosophy of time, genetic mutation, geopolitics, and automation. Kasiterit is available to watch on Issue's website from mid-July to mid-August 2024. It is accompanied by an excerpt from Rizaldi's related PhD research.

The AIAIA Sweatshop exhibition (held from May 17 to June 21, 2024 at the artist-run space àDuplex, in Geneva) explored through the means of art, behind the media resonances of the acronym IA/ AI, some paradoxes of the material dimensions of artificial intelligence. In a series of "rooms", AI's relationships with history, machines, the body, identities and technopolitics were put into context and questioned, far from the ethereal, fascinating or frightening images of a new technological power as immaterial as inexorable. This exhibition was born from a collaboration between the Digital Humanities seminar of Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel at the University of Geneva and the Work.Master seminar of David Zerbib at HEAD.

Why does the future dream of being mapped out, gridded, and automatically piloted by the culture of high technology? How does technology manage to present itself as a marker of civilisation, affirming the supremacy of certain bodies over others, and reinforcing a symbolic and social order that separates and immunises human beings from waste, the gremlins, aliens, the inhumans and other undesirable bodies deriving from the 'civilised human'? Over the last 40 years, voices have been raised to question the great narrative of Western technology. These voices ask: ‘Who counts as an agent of technology, as a human agent, and consequently as an agent of the future?’ It is from these areas of contestation, whose return has become impossible to ignore today, that this article seeks to decipher the dream of safe, clean, objective, and rational techno-governance, which has turned out to be anti-terrestrial, excremental, aberrant, and sexually aggressive.

Julie Enckell sat in a cinema with Anita Hugi, Head of the Film Department at HEAD – Genève since September 2023, to talk about Hugi’s journey as a cinephile, her interest in history, and her many professional roles as a movie director, programmer, festival director and professor. During the discussion, the keystrokes of Hugi’s commitment emerge: from her long-term work raising the profile of Swiss women artists and filmmakers, to her reflections on the forms of audience participation, to her defence of a new generation of Swiss filmmakers who are blazing new and exciting trails.

Tabarak Allah Abbas graduated from the HEAD – Genève Film Department in 2023 with the short film Mawtini, which has just won over its first viewers. This animated gem and the first Swiss shōnen has won several awards, including the Red Cross Art Humanité Prize and the Opening Scenes Award at the latest edition of Visions du Réel documentary festival. A fusion of Japanese animation and the traditional world of Iraq, Mawtini plunges us into the heart of Baghdad in the 1990s, in a reality where human beings are being invaded by killer robots. Against this backdrop of war, a young couple and their first-born child decide to adopt the characteristics of these cold, efficient machines in order to leave the city.

The author reflects on the 'poetics' of the round-the-world trip, showing that Orelsan's La Terre est ronde (2011) is part of a long tradition of both literature and tourism which produces a geographical enchantment of the world.

Raphaël Pieroni of HEAD – Genève discusses the many links between music and geography with Quentin Pilet, of Bongo Joe Records.

This article describes the teaching on memes as part of the Image Analysis course for first-year students of the Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication.

A practical demonstration of the promises and pitfalls of procedurally generated storytelling.

As part of their cross-disciplinary research into design and the performing arts, research duo Isis Fahmy and Benoît Renaudin sat down with the dancer and choreographer DD Dorvillier and the artist and designer Douglas E. Stanley to talk about their creative practice around cards, games, and performance.

This talk proposes an exploration of the corpus of mini-series "by" Nicole Kidman, i.e. that she produces and/or interprets: Big Little Lies (2017-2019), The Undoing (2020), Nine Perfect Strangers (2021)... The aim is to analyse the functions of the mini-series for the star (a prestige production which is an alternative to the feature film, and which allows her to reposition herself as an author), taking into account the economic and formal specificities which distinguish these astonishing star vehicles which bear the “Kidman brand“.

From the very first sequence of Normal People, the dynamic of linking and unlinking between Marianne and Connell, which constitutes the narrative substance of the series, structures the mise-en-scène: in a corridor of their high school, Marianne and Connell share the same space (linking), but don't speak to each other (unlinking), while glancing at each other furtively, each attracted and disturbed by the presence of the other (linking), yet feigning indifference (unlinking). This is how their love unfolds over the four years of their lives the series covers, forming the fabric of a sentimental chronicle made up of magnetic attraction and immeasurable desire, wounds, disappointments, and heart-rending break-ups. Linkings and unlinkings seems to represent the matrix behind just about any word Marianne and Connell utter and the most trivial of their behaviour, as well as the most sublime or the most disgraceful of their actions. The series' aesthetic choices also reflect this incessant interplay of linkings and unlinkings. However, linkings and unlinkings will primarily be considered through the format of the mini-series. After all, isn't the brevity of the episodes, with their elliptical writing and dilated temporality, a way of making the chaotic sequence of these linkings and unlinkings more palpable?

This talk examines the history and practice of converting feature films into mini-series, which has recently been revived by various streaming platforms as a way of boosting ratings and generating more content. The talk analyzes the effects of this practice by comparing different versions of several representative examples, and it primarily focuses on how the process of re-editing generates a new narrative structure and a more dispersed narrative focus that alters our previous understanding of the films under discussion.

Serial practice often involves a reception that focuses on suspense. But Top of the Lake particularises its treatment of suspense by means of slowdowns in the narrative, constituting a brake on the progression of the plot. These slowdowns are all the more noticeable in a series with a limited duration, and we will question the way in which they thwart the illusion of a narrative primarily centred on the fabula. We will then address the question of serial aesthetics. Top of the Lake recursively returns to sequences that concentrate the mystery in the plot, and these returns determine specific effects on the viewer.

With We Own This City (2022), David Simon returns to his favourite city, Baltimore. Based on Justin Fenton's barely fictionalised investigation, he offers a mini-series that is as dry in its narrative as it is implacable in its indictment of the violence perpetrated by the BPD (Baltimore Police Department). What interests us here is the transition from the long time frame of The Wire's five seasons to the short time frame of We Own This City. What does this mean in terms of narrative and focus? What rewriting of Justin Fenton's investigation did this require? What temporality, particularly fragmented, does this unique season implement? These are the questions we will try to answer in our conference.

Produced by Channel 4, The Red Riding Trilogy (2009) is a singular audiovisual object. On the one hand, each part of the trilogy aims to offer the viewer the appearance of autonomy. On the other hand, and in the opposite direction, this fiction in three parts makes use of a narrative connectivity whose aim is to produce, between the different segments, discrete and subtle effects of micro-seriality. The purpose of this paper is to study this singular dialectic between autonomy and interdependence, particularly insofar as it blurs the established boundaries between cinema film and mini-series.

This paper examines true crime documentary mini-series Making a Murderer and The Staircase within the context of their snowball transmedia structure. While their success partly rests upon the spreadable features of streaming platforms, they also owe a great deal to the community activities of dedicated fans on a variety of third-party platforms and social media networks.  Consequently, the narrative closure of true crime streaming mini-series and limited-series merely offers an opportunity for further narrative encounters via transmedia user-generated seriality. This amateur transmedia structure prompts reconsideration of forces that undermine the boundaries of the streaming mini-series in the digital age.

Today’s cognitive capitalism operates on the logic of separationism that demands self-commodification and self-representation: a logic of exteriority that, as we know, is also engraved e.g., by social media. Equally, omnipresent media consumption, spectatorship, observation, by-standing and the outside view are qualities that society today is abundantly saturated with, and that help the efforts of late cognitive and data capitalists’ to construct hyper individualism, separation, and apathy, emotional states that manipulate and alienate subjects from their own social and expressive efforts.

How can we move towards a shared desire of how we would like to live? How do we act in order to better our own life or situation, while also serving a collective understanding? These are questions that need to be addressed in every living environment – within the city as well as beyond it.

I am interested in writing about my performance-based pedagogy in relation to the text-based research that more directly signals its politics. This, in order to highlight important practice-based tensions and signal something about relationships between knowing and teaching in our changing world.

In the contemporary art world, a professional sector based on the globalised market economy where I worked for over twenty years as a production manager, a curator, and later as a – mostly public – institution director, environmental awareness only started guiding my choices late in my career. I usually prioritised the production, circulation and transmission of artistic projects, and the ecological paradigm only very occasionally interfered with creative and curatorial freedom.

As an artist working in collaboration, my art practice activated reciprocal actions and responses in public contexts, while working in universities has paid my wages and supported my art practice with research grants. In 2012, to engage with the social-ecological crisis, I brought my art practice into the University of the Arts London (UAL) where I work. By making conceptual interventions, I encountered the separation of academic and artistic discourses and practices from the executive functions of the university.

If you are reading this text on a computer screen, it is possible that your eyes are drying out. Prolonged exposure to bright electronic screens makes us blink less and thus reduces lubrication, which can result in a condition known as “dry eye”, causing discomfort and seriously affecting our vision. At the same time that our eye globes dehydrate in front of the screens, it is estimated that about 33% of the terrestrial globe is presently undergoing processes of aridification. Adding to global warming, the most immediate cause of aridification around the world is the inappropriate use of land by conventional livestock and agriculture.

There’s nothing rhetorical about the question in the title of this article. Indeed, only a small minority of the HEAD – Genève’s Visual Arts graduates pursue a career as an artist, with exhibitions in galleries and public institutions. The overwhelming majority of them go for less delineated career paths; some even invent their own professions. In spring 2023, with the aim of better promoting and supporting the richness of their experience, the Visual Arts department invited a number of alumni to recount their trajectories. In their own way, these career paths give expression to the poetry and desire for autonomy the alumni cultivated during their studies. Here are a few extracts, including the stories of a theatre mask-maker, a film-director, and an 'artist-gatherer'.

The seventh art is ‘the art of ghosts’, as Jacques Derrida once said. This is what Clélia Zernik, professor of aesthetics at the Paris Beaux-Arts, demonstrates in her brilliant essay L'attrait du fantôme (2019), co-written with Erik Zernik. According to Zernik, we need both the spectre and the spectral, because they shed fundamental light on the co-presence of the visible and the invisible. Organised this spring for first-year cinema students at the HEAD – Genève, Zernik’s workshop lifted the veil on the phantomality of the seventh art, exploring not only how spectres appear on screen, but also how the moving image – even more than photography's still image – is ontologically ghostly. Here’s the interview.

For years, the FBI monitored the activities of Eslanda and Paul Robeson, both civil rights activists and communist sympathisers in the United States. The artist Steve McQueen makes this surveillance visible in a work that combines sound recording and over 12 hours of scrolling through archive documents from the FBI, redacted of sensitive information. As part of the FNS and HEAD – Genève 'Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism' research project, Doreen Mende (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) sat down with McQueen to talk about this work, the Robesons as intellectual and activist figures, and their contribution to pan-Africanism and exchanges between East and West during the Cold War.

This text offers an iconographic study of the figure of the female computer-user based on advertising brochures from the second half of the 20th century. What fictional situations do these commercial photographs represent? And above all, what gender roles do they define for women? By studying the advertisements, the text supports the hypothesis that the boom in personal computing and the birth of the concept of the 'user' in the 1980s led to a deconstruction of the image of the computer as a feminine machine.

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-German kiosk in the Bauhaus town of Weimar. The aesthetic and political issues raised by the American pop culture artefacts led Katharina Hohmann to direct the research project Jeansdinge on the Move (2021-2022). In this chronicle-like article, Hohmann details the multiple artistic and critical approaches developed around the collection of denim objects, gathered on the website jeansdinge.com

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 PhD thesis, Quand les artistes font forme en habitant ensemble. Usages, présences, imaginaires (“When artists live together. Use, presence, and the imaginary”) under the supervision of Olivier Desvoignes, HEAD, and Luca Pattaroni, EPFL, 2022, Mathilde Chénin considers the forms of commonality which communities of artists create and how individual art practice undergoes displacement.

A teacher in the CCC Master's Research Programme and a researcher at HEAD – Genève, Gene Ray is interested in radical practices of art and activism in a time of multiple social and ecological crises. He spoke with the artist, researcher and activist duo, Jay Jordan and Isabelle Frémeaux, who took part in the struggle against the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport project, settling on this highly publicized “zad” (zone to defend). Together, they look back at the aesthetics that developed on this field of experimentation around social forms. By defending older principles such as conviviality and proclaiming their healing powers and ability to invent galvanizing myths, these social forms refuse contemporary art as we know it.

As part of a course dedicated to the Theory of Representation, first-year Bachelor's students in Interior Architecture provided chromatic analyses, or analyses of the programming and utilisation, of Tik Tok, Instagram, Pinterest, and their competitors as if they were buildings. Here we present extracts from these unusual diagnoses, which are based on the principle that interior architecture is now situated at the nexus between physical and mediated spaces, as taught by Javier Fernández Contreras, who is responsible for the course.

The HEAD – Genève welcomed journalist Mélody Thomas during its traditional open doors for an interview on her book La Mode est politique : Un bref lexique inclusif (2022). The meeting was recorded and gave rise to an episode of the Front Row podcast by researcher and designer duo Tara Mabiala and Camille Farrah Buhler. With them, Thomas recounts her journey in a changing industry and discusses some of the issues raised by her book.

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 Mistakes, discusses his use of the book as an exhibition space, the role of the archive, and the importance of initiating a counter-narrative through the recovery of visual culture′s left-overs.

Averse to intentionality and fixed creative processes, the artist Anne Brugni has set up a working framework where accidents, chance associations, and serendipity can occur. She thus often composes from cut-out papers that end up in a jumble on her desk or on the floor. Certain coincidences of proximity favour the shaping of images. Here, Brugni describes this mode of production made up of controlled uncertainty, where the idea is always next to oblivion, waste to salvage.

Since the 1990s, Guillaume Dégé has been devoting himself to keeping notebooks, this daily practice becoming the breeding ground for all his graphic work. In this talk, Dégé presents the typology of his notebook practice, both free and without prerequisites yet also ritualised and formalised. A bibliophile, Dégé details the uses of the notebook as an intimate tool with examples ranging from ‘jogging’ notebooks, which allow him to formulate graphic problems while maintaining his hand’s ability, to ‘compost’ notebooks, where interesting parts of failed drawings are recycled through collage.

Passionate about theatre and dance, but believing herself to have little talent for these practices, Marion Fayolle has bypassed the limits of the stage by imagining a theatre on paper, where her characters move and dance. Fayolle explains how she treats human figures as archetypes in disguise, tracing and then re-using them as interchangeable actors from one stage and one book to another. Her stories develop as a form of sequence from one drawing which suggests another, showing far greater potential for interaction and transformation than that of actual individuals on stage.

Pondering on creative thinking, the illustrator Delphine Perret wanted to examine the experiences of her colleagues. Her book Les Ateliers is the result of a meeting with 24 illustrators who told her about their way of stimulating the creative muscle and the conditions under which it can function. The relationship between artistic and non-artistic work, procrastination, the need for a recognition of creative activity as work, the studio as an intimate place of emergence, and creative epiphany: Perret shows, through these encounters with her fellow illustrators, the considerable energy it requires to get to work.

Mirjana Farkas questions the constraints of illustration, grouping them under the broad categories of Time and Space. Time that is gained and lost, dreamt of or successfully spared. The time it takes to create a book and the time given by the commissioner. The space of the imaginary museum in the mind, that of meetings and collaborations. But also the creative activities’ physical space, be it the studio or the medium. Farkas discusses her practice through the prism of these various ways of apprehending the constraints of illustration, which are also opportunities.

Cover page, binding, reading direction, back cover, the illustrator Blexbolex sees the book as a precise mechanism whose inner workings he uses and disrupts to imagine publications that surprise and amaze by their ingenuity and their ability to create narration. Blexbolex considers his passion for the book as an object, which began in a silk-screen printing workshop, and comments on the variety of his production, from underground productions to thrillers and children's books.

In this talk, Anne-Margot Ramstein discusses the four-handed work that has developed through her collaboration with Matthias Arégui. This joint production of images, which began instrumentally when she needed to show drawings to a publisher, has enabled her to free herself from some of the constraints of what is expected in an album in terms of personal style and signature. Ramstein speaks about how they allow themselves to add to or delete one another's work, without any marked deference to it, in order to create a dual work, and how this activity as part of a pair influences her personal practice.

Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s Theory of The Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), this essay examines the reception of fashion collective Vetements through the lens of the gimmick, discussing the label’s infamous DHL t-shirt as a prime example of a design that simultaneously “overperforms” and “underperforms.” An aesthetic judgement, the gimmick triggers an estimation of both an excess and a lack of labor, which, in Ngai’s words, reflects an “uncertainty about time and value.” Connecting the DHL t-shirt to the state of creative labor in the industry, the essay foregrounds the engagement of design with issues surrounding labor.

A teacher and researcher at HEAD – Genève, Nicolas Nova recently published the book Exercices d'observation, which invites us to train our attention skills. Composed of short texts, it is illustrated by sketches which are themselves ways of noting, classifying and ultimately thinking about the world and its small details. Nova sat down with Julie Enckell Julliard to talk about observation, a practice common to anthropologists and artists, which the reader is enjoined to cultivate and nurture in its different modes.

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.

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 these tools – for example by asking AI for crustacean-shaped whipped cream lettering – he has managed to produce images that he deems inconceivable otherwise. In this interview, Mineur details his observations and speculates on the evolution of creative professions in the face of the automation of drawing.

Giulia Mensitieri conducted a field survey on the working conditions in fashion, demonstrating how the image of luxury masks and justifies the precarious reality of workers. In this in-depth interview, Aude Fellay and Emilie Meldem discuss their own criticism of the conflation they see in the book between fashion design and object advertising and, with Mesnitieri, attempt to co-construct a practice-embedded approach.

During her studies, Eva Meister took on a number of student jobs as her family could not afford to support her. In her TRANS – master’s thesis, Meister, now an alumna, looked back on these jobs and how they interacted with her artistic practice and her studies. Starting from an observation on precariousness and the risk of getting stuck in this triple status of worker, student, and artist, Meister considers how art allows for self-representation and thus for the objectification of working conditions and daily constraints. Here, we publish large excerpts from her Master’s thesis as well as some of her related drawings.

In recent years, numerous initiatives have called for better remuneration for artists. The success of these campaigns is a testament to a salutary change in the status of the artist. For too long, this status was associated with a romantic vision of art as something practised out of passion, as opposed to a work that justifies remuneration. In this text, curator Julie Marmet, who is involved in favour of artists' rights with Visarte Genève, looks back at the genealogy of this movement, speculating on how the integration of artists into the world of workers redefines the very notion of work.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt famously distinguished labour – linked to bodily activity and the reproduction of it – from work that transcends individual life. Through its physical and material aspects, painting is an activity that nonetheless covers the realities of labour, all the while offering independence from it by opening up a critical space. In this interview conducted in his Geneva studio, the painter Yoan Mudry talks about the practical issues and financial considerations related to his production process. Mudry also considers the possibility of commenting, through painting, on the Google-proposed standardised representations of life-at-work.

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 dogmatic, his brush following faithfully the movements of his grid-like fabrics, which he distorts as he stretches them onto the frame. What is well- or badly-done thus merge in a dance that combines Malevich's quest for the absolute with the materialism of the truncated object. In this interview, Chardon discusses his approach as an artist and as a teacher at the HEAD – Genève’s Representation option.

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. The chosen project (Fanny Alvarez, Loraine Friedli, Elsa Hoover, and Jordane Vincenzi) was inspired by chocolate squares broken with a hammer, which form abstract motifs evoking the contents of the packaging. This commission was part of a desire to confront the students with concrete and situated demands. Here we look back at the project with annotated pictures.

Assemble. That’s the watchword of British artist and filmmaker Louis Henderson. For the past thirteen years, Henderson has been building a 2.0 filmography, essentially using the teeming universe of expanding images and sounds from the Internet, better known as net-found footage. In this respect, his protean texts and films take an archaeological approach to examining the materiality of the Internet while exploring themes as varied as politics, sociology, and anthropology. More specifically, Henderson’s practice stresses the permanence of cultural relics related to colonial pasts. We met with him ahead of his intervention in the Cinema Department’s net-found footage workshop in 2023.

“The world has already been filmed, it is now a matter of transforming it”, said Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle in 1973. This reservoir of images has since been made available by the Internet. In this article, the French filmmaker and critic, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, considers the practice of filmmakers who – rather than adding images to the world – recycle traces of historical events or fragments of everyday life in a deliberately non-productive approach. The montages they make (re)articulate the flow of images found on the Internet, producing often-engaged narratives that counter the alienating logic of spectacle denounced by Debord. This article introduces a programme devoted to “net-found footage”, presented at the Entrevues film festival in Belfort from 22 to 27 November 2022.

From a fantasy aroused by some men′s underwear packaging, to the search for oneself in the depths of social media, to research into one′s own Iraqi origins; these three films created within the framework of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s net-found footage workshops at the HEAD – Genève can be watched here.

Europe has set itself the goal of re-launching several night train lines in order to reduce the ecological footprint of passenger transport. There is talk of linking Paris to Barcelona or Madrid in one night by 2024. From Switzerland, the Basel-Amsterdam line has resumed night service. But these journeys are more reminiscent of plastic boxes than the elegance of the Orient Express. For her Master’s degree in Interior Architecture, Elizaveta Krikun examined this discrepancy between the image and reality of the night train. In her project, she drew inspiration from the trains of the Belle Epoque to design a contemporary and comfortable setting with high-quality materials, modular spaces, and communal areas for socialising.

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 of trans people in pathos or fetishism mode. Now, figures from minority communities are instilling new narratives, in which they embody active subjects. In this interview, river discusses issues of representation and his own path, which he deliberately keeps more hidden.  

There is a unique sort of drama to court proceedings. It is this shaping of reality which sparked Yamina Zoutat’s interest in filmmaking when she was a court reporter. In her films, Zoutat seeks to bring out voices consigned to oblivion, such as those of defendants’ mothers called to the stand, whose testimonies seem to have a secondary status.

Marked out by authoritative voices and a proven research methodology, the academic path may seem fairly straightforward. In her book Zizanies, art historian and critic Clara Schulmann takes a different approach, allowing herself to be drawn in as she listens to the voices in her daily life: hers first, but also those of other women, be they podcast authors, thinkers, artists, or friends. Composed of fragments, Schulmann’s book forms a weaving of voices, drawing an intellectual and emotional landscape marked by feminism while also revealing the author's own line of thought. In this free-flowing conversation, Julie Enckell asks Schulmann about the implications of this personal transition within the pedagogical context.

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 interfaces engage us in an endless game, curator Roxane Bovet’s exhibition Forget Chess, presented as part of the inauguration of the HEAD campus in June 2022, proposed a rediscovery of the political and experimental essence of the game, i.e. its capacity to create experimental models in which social relations can be transformed.

In this Talking Heads conversation with art critic Jill Gasparina and digital anthropologist Nicolas Nova, Lialina bears witness to the paradigm shift that took place in the 2000s with the passage from a user culture to a mass culture, where technologies have become invisible and indistinct.

A crucial stage in the construction of a film – where rhythm, grammar and dramaturgy are redefined – editing remains a shadowy profession. Ael Dallier Vega is an editor and lecturer in the HEAD – Genève’s Cinema Department. In this interview with Delphine Jeanneret, she recounts how this immersive activity unfolds in the darkness of the editing room, processing hundreds of hours of rushes in order to bring out the director's vision, sometimes to the point of being engulfed in parallel temporalities. Active in fields as varied as fiction, documentary, art film and video clips, Dallier Vega notably edited Mati Diop's film Atlantique, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019. She has worked on new projects by artist Philippe Parreno, and regularly collaborates with Marie Losier, a fellow teacher in the Cinema Department. Dallier Vega recently edited Patrick Muroni's documentary Ardente-x-s (2022), about the Lausanne-based ethical pornographic film production collective OIL Productions.

Formerly scattered over several buildings in Geneva, the HEAD – Genève has now regrouped the majority of its activities on a new campus in the Châtelaine district. In 2021, the Visual Arts department in particular moved out from its historic building next to the Musée d’Art et d'Histoire on the Boulevard Helvétique – commonly known as BH – to a new site. A few weeks before its departure from these emblematic premises, covered with patina and graffiti, Michael Jakob was there to interview its users: ushers, cleaning staff, students, and teachers, who testified to their attachment to the charismatic space. The video that he created, which can be viewed here, pays homage to the venerable building as much as to the creative energy that was exercised there.

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 illustration, went through a series of stages before coming to life in the form of comics in pen, felt-tip pen or digital tablet. This article looks back on a year of illustration workshops through a selection of student productions, from the script to the adaptation into drawings and story-boards. The teachers who supervised these workshops discuss the methodological and theoretical issues specific to the different objects produced by the students.

On the 18th of June, 2022, documenta fifteen will open its doors in Kassel. The Indonesian collective ruangrupa run this new edition of the German five-year event, seeking to embed it in its own community-based and decentralised ecosystem. In a long interview conducted by the students of Marie-laure Allain Bonilla’s seminar, farid rakun – one of the members of ruangrupa – details the collective’s working methodologies, how their singular concepts open up to new curatorial epistemologies, and the relationships that have been established between their base in Jakarta and Kassel.

The notion of ‘ecosystem’ finds a strong echo in contemporary artistic practices. Influenced by the neo-materialist approach, which challenges the primacy of the subject and considers matter to be endowed with vitality, some artists showcase works that are open to mutation and alteration, of which they no longer are the operators. In this essay, David Zerbib posits that the ecological crisis first and foremost provokes a change of the human position in a polycentric network of plural agencies, before urging artists to withdraw from the productive system or engage in immaterial practices.

Yves Corminboeuf is a pioneer of sustainable design in Switzerland. A lecturer and delegate for sustainability at HEAD, he helps numerous organisations to take into account the ecological issues specific to their model of production. He is also active in the field of reuse through Matériuum, a much-appreciated upcycling centre in the cultural sector that collects and sells construction materials. In this interview with Elizabeth Fischer, which features a long introduction, Corminboeuf looks back at the origins of the notion of eco-design and how designers can limit their impact on the Earth system’s resources.

New technologies often come with harmful side effects, on both the ecological and psychosocial levels. Rather than putting the emphasis on novelty, Kris De Decker tries to address our human needs with articles about forgotten technologies, recycling, repairing, and ingenuity. De Decker publishes his articles online on Low-Tech Magazine, which he founded in 2007. The creation of a low-energy version of the Low-Tech Magazine website – powered by a solar panel installed on his balcony – not only combined the medium with its content, but demonstrates the creative potential to be gained from frugality. Design teacher and researcher Nicolas Nova (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) – himself the author of a research project on cell phone repair stores – talks with De Decker about his exciting and inspiring editorial project and tackles the political significance of a paradigm shift from production to de-production, maintenance and repair.

In addition to being one of the world’s most polluting industries, fashion subjects its workers to some of the most degrading working conditions. In the face of these abuses, consumer mobilisation remains negligible. Based on this observation, Mikhail Rojkov has launched a series of awareness-raising actions, including the repair of new ripped jeans that he puts back on the shelves to point out the system’s excesses and absurdities. However gentle and caring, such interventions trample on certain principles at the heart of capitalism, including private property. In this text, Rojkov discusses the boundaries between vandalism and embellishment, and the potential for political transformation concentrated in a thread, a needle and an act of love.

User-centred design has imposed itself solely on the development of computer interfaces and protocols. Far from being neutral, on the contrary, this approach to design is biased, because it is based on certain clearly identified users – workers, consumers – while other more precarious populations, or those with less formatted practices, remain in its blind spot. Reducing an object's thinking to its sole use also comes at the cost of a more global reflection which could integrate, for example, the waste the object will eventually become. At the invitation of the Rennes Digital Tech Conference 2021, Anthony Masure, head of research at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), and Brieuc Saffré, director of the Circulab circular design agency, started a critique of user-centred design in order to consider other avenues, from citizen-centred design to design that removes rather than adds. We publish here an audio version of this discussion moderated by Julien Vey, president of Saint-Malo’s Institut supérieur de design.

The HEAD and the HEG have joined forces to develop a carbon calculator to measure the impact on the climate of the activities of the Universities of Applied Sciences and Arts (HES) in French-speaking Switzerland. Led by Anthony Masure, Yves Corminboeuf (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) and Laurent Cornaglia (HEG), this research project is currently in its final development phase. It will then be available via a self-service application. For this feature, we have calculated the emissions of matali crasset’s lecture in January 2022, using this tool.

matali crasset is an admired designer, known for her public commissions and numerous editions with brands. In this Talking Heads event hosted by Alexandra Midal, crasset addresses the more subterranean and essential aspects of her work, touching on politics and the role of the designer in a damaged world. Between a side step that leads into the neighbour's house, a thought of the object in its multiple layers of sensibility and what she calls the ‘dwellings of restitution’ – which are hypotheses of housing in direct relation to the environment – crasset transmits an idea of design as a point of mediation between ‘sensing’ beings and nature.

In this video portrait dedicated to them, the delegate of Diversity & Inclusion at HEAD – Genève, Nayansaku Mufwankolo, highlights the different stages that have allowed them to develop their practice. From poems initially confined to private notebooks and now developing into space, to academic studies on the official history of art which lead to the affirmation of an intersectional thought through the means of art, the path of Nayansaku Mufwankolo is marked by a desire for transmission and to break free from dominant dogmas.

A CCC alumna, artist and activist, Marisa Cornejo made a film on the events that took place on Santiago’s Plaza Italia, which became the Plaza de la Dignidad on the 18th of October, 2019. For several weeks, demonstrators gathered there in the face of police repression to demand better social justice and the repeal of the Constitution inherited from the Augusto Pinochet regime. On the 13th of March, 2021, the government removed the statue of General Baquedano; a symbol of Chilean divisions which stood in the centre of the square and had just been damaged. A military hero for some, a genocidaire of indigenous populations for others, Baquedano left in the middle of the night, through the back door. Cornejo teamed up with her daughter Katya Kasterine and Cecilia Moya Rivera (a CCC student) to add to the film a multi-voice essay, a diary of the protest, published in English and Spanish. Together they weave together memories of a country criss-crossed with multiple conflicts, hopes, violence and inequalities, where the absent presence of the statue of the general has become a leitmotif. This article is a new episode in and the coda of a feature published last year: All Monuments Must Fall.

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 hypotheses. In it, Boisseau, Westermeyer and Zerbib test Helmuth Plessner's theory of positionality, according to which plants, animals and humans are differentiated by their distinct relationship to space.

This series of presentations looks at some concrete cases in which art and humanitarian aid work together in crisis areas. The speakers bear witness to the positive impact of art, both in their experience as viewers and in their practice. Katarzyna Grabska’s presentation offers final reflections to wrap up the symposium.

Artists who are attentive to humanitarian situations raise the question of the gaze in the face of vulnerability and appraise the risks of voyeurism. More generally, the speakers in this section reflect on the agency of an artwork in how it arouses complex aspects of cognition and emotion.

These conferences tackle the issue of engagement. Beyond representation, how can art enter into dialogue with communities in the grip of humanitarian crises? Through projects in Kenya, Afghanistan and Beirut, the speakers evoke the healing potential of art. The model of Greek tragedy is also introduced as a way of exploring and purging personal and collective trauma.

These lectures question the related, though sometimes competing, notions of ethics and aesthetics. Certain symbols make it possible to connect these notions. Similarly, a dialogue between distant perspective and field action allows for the development of a positive entanglement between the two categories.

Actress Véronique Augereau and actor Philippe Peythieu are the voices behind the French Marge and Homer Simpson. For this Talking Head, Augereau and Peythieu sit down with graphic designer Olivier Lebrun, author of the cult book A Pocket Companion to Books from The Simpsons. While sharing their own dubbing anecdotes, they address the importance of the voice in cinema and acting, the emergence of talking pictures, the technique and know-how of dubbing actors, artificial voices, and the longevity of Matt Groening's libertarian and rebellious Simpsons.

In recent years, the Photography Pool of HEAD – Genève has organised two transversal workshops in collaboration with CERN, the EPFL’s Biophore and the Geneva Astronomical Observatory. In 2017-2018, the "Figures" workshop led to the publication, Un signal sur un bruit de fond. In 2019-2020, Infiniment infini was the title of both a second publication and the workshop from which it stemmed. Both publications are accessible in PDF in this article. Artist and curator Annette Amberg was invited to bring these two years to a close with a text of her own creation, which we also publish here. In it, Amberg reflects on the place of CERN in culture, also analysing the tensions between technological development – which includes increasingly sophisticated visualisation and representation tools – and the tangible space-time to which human relations are limited.

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 by teachers and researchers from the school. HEAD – Publishing’s originality lies in the fact that it offers these works in the form of printed books sold in bookshops, but also in print-on-demand, free ePub versions and screen reading on the HEAD – Publishing website. The books were designed through an innovative process that questions the relationship between printed and digital books. The initiators of the project – Julie Enckell Julliard, Anthony Masure and Dimitri Broquard – report here on this editorial experience.

As part of a research project, Benjamin Stroun (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) sat down with Catherine Meurisse, author of the comics La Légèreté (Dargaud, 2016), Les Grands espaces (Dargaud, 2018), and more recently La Jeune femme et la mer (Dargaud, 2021). Meurisse is also known for her long-standing collaboration with the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Here is an audio extract of this interview, in which Stroun questions Meurisse about her relationship with comics; a genre for which she has momentarily set aside press cartoons.

The European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP), an informal forum of artists, theorists, philosophers, educators, performers, curators, musicians, urbanists, anthropologists and other cultural actors across Europe and beyond, has assembled to propose new ways of recognizing the values of contemporary cultural practices. The EFAP Charter for Advanced Practices takes the form of a preliminary communication is hoped to become an expanded conversation across the fields that have been at the forefront of significant shifts in what is recognized as research and of its place within the trajectory of practice. There is an investment here in new ways of multiplying and proliferating how practices instantiate forms of open source research as opposed to new forms of excellence. We publish a translation of this text, whose original version in English is accessible here.

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 to this declaration. However, the HEAD advocates for and develops research formats that depart from an overly academic, or application-oriented, framework. In an interview, Anthony Masure, Head of the Research Institute at the HEAD, describes the school’s initiatives to develop an heuristic research process driven by creation and whose restitution can bypass the academic text. In addition, Doreen Mende, Researcher and Head of the CCC Research-based Master Programme, discusses the political role of advanced art practices in their dissemination of knowledge and how they deconstruct historical hierarchies, which, conversely, the Vienna Declaration tends to rigidify.

Renewing architecture and its paradigms for a future full of unknowns, in a multiple and archipelagic world, subject to the depletion of resources and the challenge of climate change; such was the ambition of Archipelago, an event jointly organised by HEAD – Genève and HEPIA. Dozens of international practitioners and theoreticians took part in meetings that were broadcast in livestream from the HEAD Cube auditorium, transformed into a television studio for the occasion. This article looks back at a selection of scenarios evoking a radical change of the discipline of architecture, including that of ceasing to build.

In the spring of 2021, the Fashion Department invited Anja Aronowsky Cronberg to talk to students about her experience as the editor of the magazine Vestoj. Cronberg was a pioneer in developing an academic theoretical approach without denying a love for the glamour of fashion. An abridged version of this conversation, led by Aude Fellay, is presented here.

Against a deluge of images, certain forms of montage, compilation and spatialization allow for a critical engagement with images. Doreen Mende looks back at the approaches of Soviet women editors and the artist Harun Farocki, who distinguished themselves in this emancipatory "new pedagogy of images," while Claire Atherton evokes Chantal Akerman's film installations and Olivier Zuchuat looks at the internal construction of Roy Andersson's shots, which are conceived as paintings.

Montage is one of the privileged instruments of cinema for directing the attention and emotions of the spectators. Alfred Hitchcock, who defined himself as a director of spectators before being a director of actors, agreed with this. This series of lectures looks at several experiments and theories related to the effects that montage produces, from the manipulation of minds through subliminal images, to the discoveries of the Russian theorist Lev Koulechov on the meaning that emerges from the interaction of shots, and finally to the contemporary technique of oculometry, which determines where the gaze lands in an image.

These lectures highlight the physical and material dimension of montage in various contexts outside cinema. Through musical composition, theatre, architecture or literary creation, montage can be a technique as much as a subject or a metadiscourse; one that reveals its seams in transpositions outside the field of the moving image.

This series of lectures approaches the notion of montage in arts and activities close to cinema such as new media, video games and comics. Freeing himself from cinemacentrism, Frederik Peeters defends the position that montage in comics takes place in the reader's mind, while Selim Krichane also points out the difference of video games as the art, first and foremost, of immersion. Digital cultures, for their part, bear witness to a montage process that escapes the singular figure, becoming collective in the case of the fans detectives into which Chloé Galibert-Laîné is looking, or even automated by algorithms, according to the research of Nicolas Nova.

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 only reinforced this economic model, making the precariousness of life in gentrified urban territories even more sensitive. A Work.Master guest lecturer in 2020-2021, Morag Keil comes back to her experience of teaching remotely, including the methods she set up to sketch out a digital community with her students. Together they created the film Great expectations/ broken dreams, about an alternative art school of their imagination.

The history of artists is marked by two contradictory impulses: first, to free oneself from the judgement of institutionally approved personalities, and second, to overcome one's own solitude. This double fantasy acts as a motor, as resistance, as a displacement that often leads to the creation of new forms or artistic communities with variable self-management formats. In 2020, three graduates of the Visual Arts department (Justine Salamin, Eliot Ruffel and Samuel Cardoso) formed the Medium Sans Serif collective to offer support to young artists. Through discussions, "critical sessions," editorial production and curatorial projects, they aim to support and nourish the reflections of young graduates after their training at the HEAD. The approach took root at the Galerie Alexandre Mottier, at a time when the gallery was looking to reinvent itself.

It is rare to read excerpts from a film script that is still in post-production. Between two editing sessions, Carmen Jaquier discusses the writing of her second feature film, Les Paradis de Diane, which tells the story of Diane, a thirty-year-old woman on the run after giving birth to her first child. Co-written with Jan Gassmann, who also co-directed the film, the script was initially developed between September 2014 and June 2016 within the HEAD/ECAL Film Master’s. Although the substance of the film was already present in this first version, the story has since changed significantly. This interview conducted by film critic and peer director Mariama Balde highlights the often winding journey of a film, from the first idea to editing.  

The liquid element is omnipresent in Geneva, a city known for its harbour, its Jet d'Eau, rivers and fountains. Yet numerous infrastructures also channel and domesticate this water in a draconian way. In this text, the author attempts to bring out a Genevan spirit in the examination of water-related monuments in the city at the end of the lake.

In 1996, shortly before the handover of Hong Kong to China, an artist sprayed the statue of Queen Victoria with red paint and disfigured it with a hammer. The meaning of this action remained ambiguous. Was it an attack on British colonial power? A return to the methods of the Cultural Revolution's Red Guards? Or the broader idea of one empire succeeding another? In light of the new ideological division in Hong Kong – in which the Victoria statue was appropriated both by the "democracy" camp and the Chinese repression of dissident forms of action – Phoebe-Lin Elnan advocates deconstructing the forms of mental oppression that certain monuments represent.

One night in 1998, a collective amputated the foot of an equestrian statue of Juan de Oñate in New Mexico. In this article, Gene Ray examines the multiple echoes of this iconoclastic act, a reference to the mutilation of indigenous Acoma people 400 years earlier by the Spanish conquistadors, to whom Oñate belonged.

In a country like Spain, where the memory of Christopher Columbus is regularly brandished as a national cement and source of pride – and with the institution of monarchy in decline – debates over the demolition of his statues arouse widespread disapproval. Román Alonso analyses the myth of the "discovery" of America in the Spanish imagination and the place occupied within it by the numerous monuments dedicated to Columbus, symbol of the beginnings of colonisation.

Based on a neighbourhood dispute between an Arab man who listens to loud music at night and an unidentified person who demands silence, Balam Ronan Simon Delgado reflects on the politics of sound and listening. He hypothesises that our way of listening is marked by the burden of history on both a personal and collective level, influencing our relationship with our environment.

In this text, Roman Karrer examines the way in which the names of streets, squares or mountains lend such places a symbolic dimension. The name of the botanist and zoologist Louis Agassiz, born in Fribourg, Switzerland, is found in almost 80 locations, even on the Moon, and is an example of this kind of problematic anchoring. Long unaddressed, the racism of Agassiz – who, in defence of white supremacism, opposed Darwin's theories of evolution – now makes him a famously controversial figure. Karrer discusses the various ways in which Agassiz's name was glossed over (or not) in recent years, and considers some positive developments, including the tribute paid to the black science fiction novelist Octavia E. Butler, whose name designates a point on the planet Mars.

In a 1997 issue of October journal devoted to the Situationists, T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith rejected the narrative that, in the early 1960s, the SI renounced art in favour of politics. In reality, the organisation only renounced conventional and representational forms of art, all the while defending the utopian dimension of the artistic project. Gene Ray develops this argument by relying on the action of the Situationists at the Place de Clichy in Paris, where they tried to reinstall a statue of Fourier.

Like a dialogue between languages, this bilingual Spanish-English text also takes the form of a song and then a harangue. The text revisits Chilean history through the demonstrations against social inequality that took place in Chile in 2019. These events led to the overthrow of the equestrian statue of General Badequano, a military man who participated in the war against the Mapuche indigenous people.

For 25 years, Geneva benefited from a squat scene that was rich and crucial, both socially and culturally. The squats were occupied under various legal arrangements, defying real-estate speculation. The authors of this text take the position that the squats had become monuments, which nonetheless were eradicated by a concerted policy in the 2000s, which the authors discuss.

Since its construction in 1909, the Reformers' Wall in Geneva's Parc des Bastions has been vandalised numerous times. Based on this history of tagging and painting, Basile Collet considers the way in which vandalism participates in the disruption of a supposedly pacified public order, reigniting debate and social conflict.

Sara Bissen compares the psychological trauma left by her experience of sometimes violent historical events in the former Soviet zone – where a series of brutal regime changes were punctuated by the overthrow of statues – to the repetitive cycles of statues being erected and overthrown.

In this introduction, Gene Ray (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) reviews a series of recent events, mostly related to the Black Lives Matter movement, which may suggest that a new iconoclasm has begun. Ray associates this aggressive way of questioning the dominant history – by attacking statues – with Nancy Fraser's ecological concept of wilding. He thus creates an alliance between decolonial movements and climate activists who, in recent years, have similarly diffused forms of indiscipline in the public space.

All those who have visited the Venice Biennale have noticed a monument on the waterfront in front of the Giardini, almost in front of the Swiss Pavilion. It is the famous memorial Alla Partigiana, designed by Carlo Scarpa – the master of post-war Italian museum architecture – in collaboration with the sculptor Augusto Murer. But few know that this complex hides a key episode in the confrontation between contemporary art and political terrorism in post-war Italy. In fact, this low and horizontal monument is a reconstruction of a previous monument destroyed by a terrorist act aimed at desecrating the object of the testimony.

But what must fall? This podcast interviews members of French-speaking Swiss resistance collectives who stand against forms of oppression such as racism, patriarchy and police authority. This question broadens the notion of ‘monument’ to include institutions, such as prisons or the police.

The following essay comes from the transcription and re-elaboration of a collective reading session Camilla Paolino proposed at Fri Art Kunsthalle in February 2020, within the framework of the exhibition Dal momento in cui… which featured works by the Italian artist Ketty La Rocca (b. 1938, La Spezia; d. 1976, Florence). Taking a set of poetic proses written by La Rocca between 1972 and 1974 as a starting point, Paolino addressed concepts of incommunicability, illegibility, alienation, and withdrawal into solitude, problematizing them from the perspective of several women operating as art practitioners and cultural producers in 1960s and 1970s Italy. The deriving reflection relates the experience of La Rocca to those of Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and the other members of Rivolta Femminile, who in the same years embraced the opacity of their radical postures towards culture and society, transforming their position of alterity into a fertile ground for their subjectivation to take place. The picture then expands, drifting overseas and drawing speculative connections with the experiences of North American cultural outcasts such as Valerie Solanas and Lee Lozano.

In this podcast combined with a large body of images, Charlotte Laubard (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) explores what she calls the ‘self-taught enigma.’ Multiform, this enigma questions the modes of art learning and artistic invention as much as the criteria of legitimacy that govern art history. In particular, Laubard compares the trajectory of artists who have been subjected to various labels such as ‘brut,’ ‘outsider’ and ‘naïve’ with that of avant-garde artists from the 1950s who had to implement a form of unlearning in order to break with tradition on the one hand, and creators from non-Western spheres and learning environments on the other.

Portrayed as an absolute oddity, both solitary and providential, the American singer-songwriter and cartoonist Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) has often been labelled an outsider, ‘naïve’ and ‘crude,’ by artistic historiography. Based on readings of his work that are in turn mundane, hagiographic and biographo-pathological – and accompanied by his songs in the background – Christophe Kihm explains how Johnston embodies a certain myth of the self-taught genius, in contrast to the values of a pop music considered inauthentic and commercial.

By evoking a series of discoveries made during her research on 'informal' or 'unformatted' learning, Hélène Bézille explores the socio-historical construction of the figure of the autodidact. She observes in particular how this dual figure, oscillating between disqualification and recognition, alienation and emancipation, gained legitimacy from the 1960s onwards with the construction of the self-made man and the growing 'artification' of what we see as radical singularities.

Held on Monday March 22nd, the 2021 edition of the Master Symposium was a collective all-day event organised by the HEAD’s MA in Visual Arts Department: Work.Master, CCC, and TRANS. This year, the artist Ayesha Hameed was invited to define the theme and invite the speakers.

Titled Uncanny Ocean, the symposium focused on one aspect of the ocean – how little we know about it.

They say we know more about outer space than about the bottom of the sea. The symposium took the unknowability of the ocean as a starting point to think about the aquatic as a material and a medium. Exploring the mystery of the ocean as well as its rich and complex history of migration, trade and violence also enables us to consider spells, time out of joint, time travel, visionary fiction and other possible worlds.

This article rounds up the video recordings of the speakers’ lectures: Stefan Helmreich, Jota Mombaça, RAQS Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Mao Mollona, Stefano Harney, and Rajiv Mohabir.

In this essay, Javier Fernández Contreras examines the implications of architectural photography’s daytime tropism. While Modernism saw the development of an architectural thinking inspired by nocturnal leisure and entertainment venues such as casinos or nightclubs, a daytime mode of representation remains the dominant paradigm in architecture magazines. During a workshop in February 2020, the HEAD – Genève’s Department of Interior Architecture invited Richard Levene to create a “night edition” of El Croquis. The students’ photographs produced in this workshop engage with Koolhaas’s idea of “post-occupation,” showing buildings taken over by society, and not eternally empty and untouched. The original version of this text was published in the periodical Plan Libre.  

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 of poetry as it is taught in primary school. Radi and Demierre discuss their methods and the special place made for writing in an art and design school.

In September 2009, the literature periodical Remue.net – founded by the technophile writer François Bon – sat down with Hervé Laurent, the HEAD's "Monsieur Texte," to discuss the writing workshop Laurent pioneered ten years earlier. Here we are republishing the interview, on the occasion of this case study. Conducted by Fabienne Swiatly, the interview explains what is at play when developing a writing practice in an art school.

This selection of works by students and alumni from the HEAD's creative writing workshops testifies to the vitality and diversity of ways in which a text can be rendered. The variety of genres, from writing on the self to poetry, is matched by the variety of forms and media: editions, radio creations and sound postcards.

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 inspired by works she chose in the contemporary art collection of the Documents d'artistes network in France. In Le déclin du professeur de tennis, Radi dissects Bounty chocolate bars and catalogues of lumberjack accessories to keep morality at bay.

With Autoradio, published in 2019 by Héros-Limite, and Qui est là, published a year later by art&fiction, Carla Demierre uses concrete poetry and polyphonic narratives to express the variety of her own voices.

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 9^th, 2012, Garcia was the guest of a Talking Head dedicated to her work, which can range from texts and performances to multimedia installations and research. During the 2012 conference, Garcia – who had the honour of being invited to Europe’s largest art events, including the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, Documenta in Kassel and the Biennale de Lyon – looked back on some of her major projects, which blurred notions such as the public and the author.

In her short film À la recherche d'Aline, Rokhaya Marieme Balde focuses on her great-aunt, Aline Sitoé Diatta, who was a heroine of the anti-colonial struggle in Senegal. In addition to her political commitment, Sitoé Diatta was also reputed to possess the gift of making rain fall. Balde's film combines dreamlike reconstructions, a documentary investigation of the memories left behind by the resistance fighter and prophetess Sitoé Diatta in Casamance, and a look back at the making of the film. These different levels of narrative weave a complex portrait of a character between myth and historical reality. In this interview, Balde talks about the shoot and her career as a young filmmaker with a Bachelor's degree in Cinema from the HEAD – Genève.

For her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication, Annie a Marca authored a comic book with stylised illustrations, frightening lights and looming cast shadows. This variation on Perrault’s tale Little Red Riding Hood takes place in a contemporary cityscape. In it, the wolf becomes an emblem of rape and harassment culture. However, in this reinterpretation, little red riding hood refuses to be eaten up. In this interview, Annie a Marca returns to the mechanisms by which certain fears are imposed on women and how to overcome them.

Over the course of a workshop, Bachelor students majoring in Image/Story created artist’s books they individually produced, which were intended to be presented at the P.A.G.E.S. book fair. Comic books, leporello books, fanzines and collective projects in their own right, these editions enabled the students to consider how best to share their drawings. Here we introduce two pieces from this workshop, authored by Dorodea Leone and Julietta Saccardi, respectively a series of micro-published books – in the literal sense – and a crayoned booklet on a fratricide struggle, both mixing poetry and originality in an economically effective manner.

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 of the CCC Research-based Master Programme, sat down with Issue’s editor Sylvain Menétrey. Head to head est une série de portraits filmés d’enseignant·e·s, de chercheur·euse·s, d’artistes et de designers actif·ve·s à la HEAD – Genève. Ces rencontres sont l’occasion pour ces personnalités d’aborder leur parcours, souvent brillants, en-dehors de l’école. Pour cette nouvelle édition, Doreen Mende a répondu aux questions de l’éditeur d’Issue, Sylvain Menétrey.

This Talking Heads delocalised online gave the floor to artist and researcher Bahar Noorizadeh, who considers the alternatives that stem from art and art-research to block the machine-mania running our future. To do this, Noorizadeh exposes and deconstructs the political economy of the Internet, which modeled itself on the theories of classical liberal economists. This Talking Heads falls within the framework of a semester of lectures dealing with possible new creation models and their results on the production and valorisation systems of art and design. At a time of artificial intelligence and machine learning, work organisation and production mechanisms are transforming, inviting us to rethink the very notion of making.

The designers Demian Conrad and Alex Dujet co-organised a workshop in technology-aided typography. The aim of the workshop was to use the synergies between the analogue and the digital in the production of lettering for prints which fell within the field of concrete poetry. It was a matter of determining, on the one hand, how a composition made with an algorithm can influence the layout of a manual composition and, on the other, how manual metal typesetting changes coding in graphic design. Here’s a report on these experiences.

For his Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Communication, Tristan Bartolini developed a new system of typographic characters which transcends gender binarism in the French language. Bartolini redesigned characters from an existing font, Laurenz Brunner’s Akkurat, so as to make some of the letters interlock. While they remain readable, the gendered endings of the words escape the dichotomy of gender, or the precedence of one gender over the other. The words’ fluidity stretches between the feminine and masculine poles. Both poetical and political, Bartolini’s project was awarded the Red Cross’ Prix Art et Humanité 2020. Nayansaku Mufwankolo, an assistant at the CCC research Master’s Programme, sat down with Bartolini to discuss the political and technical issues at the heart of his project.  

This third part of the Grand Tour memories is dedicated to the work of Loana Gatti, who graduated from the CCC research Master’s Programme. In her Master’s Thesis, titled “Exploring Alternatives: counterattack of a fallen leaf,” Gatti considers alternative forms of pedagogy. Her research is informed by the transformative potential of collective and personal experiences. For her diploma presentation, Gatti developed iconographic and documentary material she collected during an exchange semester in Kyoto, Japan, where she took part in the management of a permaculture garden. This experience led her to reflect upon notions of autonomy and care.  

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. Floating between the ruins of a wrecked civilisation and clues as to a possible future, these works fit perfectly within our uncertain present.

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 following academic year for public health reasons. Most importantly, students had to work within a context disturbed by the pandemic, be it in their working conditions outside the school or in their imaginations, hijacked by the echoes of a world in pain. ISSUE’s editorial team offers a panorama of those young art practises in full turmoil, presenting a series of interviews with graduate students and images of their works shown at the Grand Tour.

In this first chapter, Giulia Essyad, a Work.Master graduate student, explains how she took over prevailing devices and aesthetic languages to create surprising, funny and powerful images. Not only seeking to fight on equal terms against the tyranny of beauty, skin colour and thinness which invades our subconscious, her pieces also invent a personal spirituality.

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 to seek cheap labour in Asian countries. These evolutions had a disastrous impact on the employment market in the West. They also resulted in both a loss of local know-how and the scandal of fast fashion workers’ working conditions in Asia. In addition, fashion designers have been completely cut-off from production. By hacking domestic knitting machines to enable them to meet the needs of small fashion labels in terms of experimentation and volume management, Valentine Ebner research project KnitGeekResearch aims to give direct control back to fashion designers. In this interview, Ebner, a professor and designer, defines the founding principles of her research, which lie between engineering and design. She also explains how her two prototypes work, giving an insight into the new aesthetics made available by these machines.

In this conversation, Richard Levene returns to the origins of the leading architecture magazine El Croquis, which he co-founded as he was finishing his architecture studies in 1982. Originally published as a black and white newspaper for the architecture projects of Spanish professors, El Croquis progressively integrated photography, colour, the English language and the monographic format dedicated to architecture’s international top names for which El Croquis has become known. In conversation with Javier Fernandez Contreras, the head of the HEAD’s Interior Architecture Department and assistant Sven Högger, Levene explains the specific choices in terms of graphic design, photography and curation which have made El Croquis a widely acclaimed magazine.

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 the HEAD – Genève) Master’s theses nonetheless fall within a clearly defined pedagogical framework, not only allowing students to contextualise their practise but also opening the doors to research, teaching and hybrid artistic practises. Insightful hypotheses and the setting out of a methodology proper to the fields of art and design are the main criteria for a successful thesis.

In association with the far° Nyon, a group of students from the HEAD – Genève worked with the artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia. At an interdisciplinary workshop during the Semaines de tous les possibles, they developed a collective project that will see the light of day at the next edition of far°, fabrique des arts vivants, from the 13th to 22nd August in Nyon. The students and the artist imagined a school for the future which develops a programme of thinking and doing linked to the notions of survival and common dreams within our dystopian present.

In her Fashion and Accessory Design Master’s thesis, Tara Mabiala tackles the question of sustainability in fashion through an affective and political approach. Instead of focusing on an optimisation of production modes and raw materials, Mabiala takes an interest in the other side of the equation, namely our relationship to clothes. Starting from the idea that sustainability implies a notion of caring for the environment, but also for ourselves, Mabiala engages in a reflection on the notion of “self-care.” She confronts this notion with case examples, citing the outfits of black activists from the civil rights movement and punks as examples in which singularity and the collective meet. Her research is presented under the form of an interview conducted by Aude Fellay, in charge of theory in the MA in Fashion Design, and a mood-board bringing together the essay’s hypothesis.

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, head of research Anthony Masure sat down with Alexia Mathieu, head of the Media Design Master’s.

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 infiltrating social media and the street, the “Design viral” project used resources from “performed design” in an effort to enrich the debate around democracy – a tall order, since as a rule virality seems to be a vehicle for Manichean and discriminatory language. Considering the current pandemic, Bernard also evokes the relationship between biological viruses and media virality, going beyond mere vocabulary.

Has the dominant tendency of neural networks (deep learning) drained all artificial intelligence cultures? In the field of creation, and more specifically design, how can we anticipate, if not derail, the uses of AI and their social repercussions? Anthony Masure presented these questions to Jürg Lehni and Douglas Edric Stanley, who organised the Thinking Machines workshop within the HEAD – Genève’s Media Design Master’s.

The deputy dean of the Cinema Department Delphine Jeanneret conducted an interview with the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, invited at Visions du Réel Festival taking place online from April 17th – May 2nd, 2020. Five documentary movies directed and produced by Costa, including The Edge of Democracy (nominated at the 2020 Academy Awards), can be watched on platforms associated with Visions du Réel Festival for this particular edition. Within the framework of this retrospective, Costa will also give an online Masterclass on Thursday April 30th, 2020, at 3pm, which will be moderated by Jeanneret and Giona Nazzaro (Visions du Réel). During the interview, Costa discusses her movies and her particular hybrid method, which involves the weaving together of personal content, family stories and anthropological considerations. Costa also comes back to the rise of the far right in Brazil, echoed by her latest film, centred on the deposition of the former President Dilma Rousseff.

In this interview with Charlotte Laubard, the French anthropologist and India and Hinduism specialist Emmanuel Grimaud revisits some of the fascinating experiments and cinematographic research in which he tackled the inter-subjective borders of communication and perception, using robots, objects of worship or idols. Distrustful of the rise of empathy as a key notion in the cognitive sciences – which reduce our relationship with the environment to neuronal functioning – Grimaud hints at ways of thinking that are more inventive, reversing away from the classical subject-object dualism and our natural tendency to anthropomorphic projection. He notably finds inspiration in shamanic experiences, charged objects and theories in experimental psychology from the 19th century. Laubard recontextualises these approaches in the art field, which is seen as a place for experiences and otherness.

The book Almanach Ecart. A collective archive, edited by Elisabeth Jobin and Yann Chateigné, concludes two years of research conducted in the archives of the Geneva collective Ecart (active between 1969 and 1982). Co-edited by the HEAD-Genève and art&fiction in partnership with the Mamco, and typeset by Dan Solbach, this collective editorial project received the Golden Letter, the highest honour from the “Best Book Design from all over the World 2020” award. In order to celebrate this outstanding distinction, we are publishing an important essay from the book, essential for the understanding of Ecart’s practice. In the published essay, Chateigné considers John Armleder’s performance Dream Piece (1976): a Native American headdress, a roller duck and a tape recorder are mentioned, among other things. Chateigné’s text presents itself as a meditation on the archive and the archive’s ascendency over the future.    

This portrait in two parts of Marie Losier, professor at the HEAD-Genève’s Cinema Department, addresses two of her complementary practises. In a video interview with her former student Lucien Monot, Losier talks about her movies, which are free and poignant portraits of people out of the ordinary, always on the edge, as with the lucha libre gay wrestler Cassandro or the musician Genesis P-Orridge. In response to this interview, Julie Enckell Juillard took an interest in Losier’s drawings, in which she found Losier’s taste for fringes and the painful contortions of living with limited bodies, but also the joys of existing and creating.

With the participation of the researcher Manos Tsarikis, the interdisciplinary research project “Body & Image in Arts & Sciences” attempts to measure how images affect us. What would be the psychological and formal mechanisms at play were an existing link to be established between images and political behaviour? In conversation with the artist Lauren Huret, Tsarikis mentions how a press photograph can dehumanise groups of people in the way it is framed, or how people, depending on their age and Internet proficiency for instance, will react to images and evaluate their veracity.

Every month, Ambroise Tièche unearths a notable lecture given at the HEAD – Genève during its history, from past to present. Most of the video recordings he uses have never been made public. A Visual Arts teacher and artist, Tièche comments on his choices, explaining the interest of these discourses in relation to contemporary art and design. For this new chapter, Tièche selects a lecture by French art historian Nathalie Boulouch, who was invited to a talk at HEAD in 2009. At that time, Boulouch's research concentrated on the eruption of colour in photography and the way this reshaped the traditionally black-and-white medium.

During a research project, the stage director Isis Fahmy and designers Laura Couto Rosado and Benoît Renaudin joined forces to assess the concept of performative objects. This notion, which they invented, covers objects that set a story in motion but which are above all fictions in themselves, specifically imagined for on-set action and actively evolving in the same way as the actors during their performance. At the time of this research – a joint project by the HEAD–Genève (HES-SO) and the Manufacture in Lausanne – Couto Rosado, Fahmy and Renaudin invented three practical capsules to explore points of convergence between the design and theatre practices and to consider our relationship to the other, be it machine, material or a living being. Interviews were also conducted with the German designer Judith Seng, and with the French stage director Halory Goerger. This article summarises different moments in the research process by combining various formats, such as theoretical text, video footage, the design of performative objects, captioned photographs and interviews.

In this introductory text, Christophe Kihm addresses the formal logic of the fashion show. The French term for fashion show, “défilé”, refers to a narrow pass in a mountain which people walked through in single file, as well as – by metonymy – the actual act of walking across the pass. Based on this, a “défilé” refers to time rather than space. However, through the construction of an image of this lapse of time to a specific rhythm, the “défilé” also produces its own space.

The recent climate change protests have affected the Fashion Weeks. The event in Stockholm was cancelled, while it was symbolically buried by the Extinction Rebellion activists in London. In other words, it may be time for fashion shows to turn a new page. Through four interviews with fashion designers Faustine Steinmetz, Emilie Meldem, Cosima Gadient (Ottolinger) and artist Marlie Mul, Aude Fellay reflects on the main criticisms as well as the undeniable benefits of this performative model, which concentrates and consumes plenty of energy. With her interlocutors, she evokes the power of the fashion show’s creative synthesis and speculates about the future of this presentation mode.

Invited by the Fashion Department to evoke the fashion show, artist and Visual Arts teacher Ambroise Tièche imagines a conversation that drifts from one thread to the next following a Geneva bus route.

For the first time, the Department of Interior Design has been commissioned to design the scenography of the fashion show for the Fashion Design graduates’ collections which will be held on 8 November 2019 at Le Cube on the school’s campus in Châtelaine. Several students submitted their projects. Ultimately, after a competition in several stages, Paulo Jorge Dias’ project Poésie was selected. The head of the workshop, Leonid Slonimskiy, discusses a selection of students’ works for this scenography as well as issues of space, narration and image associated with a fashion show in an age when cameras are ever-present.

In this interview carried out in connection with a master class focusing on prints, which he conducted at HEAD – Genève, Alex Mullins evokes his obsessional relationship with ideas. The London fashion designer takes his inspiration from powerful images that flow from screen to body and vice-versa. His clothes stand out thanks to a series of polarities: sartorialism and streetwear, chromatic shocks, creativity and rationality. His approach to design and images is strongly influenced by internet culture, with its memes, social networks, infinite repertoire of influences, and flattening of hierarchies and temporalities. Just like his collections, his Instagram account, which features photos of his fashion shows, fittings and private life, bears evidence to these loops that feed off each other. In this interview, the designer also addresses his collaborations with models and stylists as well as the abnegation required for an independent fashion brand to exist. Graduate of Central Saint Martin’s and The Royal College of Art, Mullins worked with designers such as Alexander McQueen, Jeremy Scott and Kanye West before establishing his own brand in 2013 with the support of the British Fashion Council. His collections are now on sale in fourteen shops in Australia, Japan, China and the US.

We are sharing a paper originally co-authored by Lysianne Léchot-Hirt and Nicolas Nova for the scientific periodical Techniques & Culture. The paper describes how the “creation-research” approach used by designers constitutes a unique form of technography, which may prove fruitful in the field of anthropology.

Every month, Ambroise Tièche unearths a notable lecture given at the HEAD – Genève during its history, from past to present. Most of the video recordings he uses have never been made public. A Visual Arts teacher and artist, Tièche comments on his choices, explaining the interest of these discourses in relation to contemporary art and design. For this new chapter, Tièche pays tribute to the late artist and cartoonist Tomi Ungerer, who gave a talk at HEAD in 2015. Ungerer’s immense career was in touch with the news stories and society of his time and embraced a number of different genres, styles and topics. Ungerer is joined in the discussion by Thérèse Willer, the curator of the Tomi Ungerer Museum.

Exploring places in the world where Switzerland has played an active historical role, whether as a nation or through its nationals, the artist Denise Bertschi works on the notion of « Swiss neutrality. » Bertschi defines the traces she finds as soft evidence, which she then organises and connects with other images and narratives in her video, photography and graphic design works. Her work reveals the spirit of a time and place, translating into images the ambiguity of the abstract and unsustainable notion of neutrality — a smoke screen for Switzerland’s international activities. In this talk with the curator Giulia Bini, Bertschi evokes her mode of operation, how she combines narratives, and her use of the visual clues she finds on site. Bertschi is currently writing a PhD thesis in art (HEAD-EPFL) under the supervision of Doreen Mende and Nicolas Braghieri.

In this portrait, which takes the form of an interview, Julie Enckell Julliard seeks to grasp the originality and radicality of Alexandra Midal’s thinking, which enlarges the field of design theory by tackling unusual topics such as the links between the Industrial Revolution and the appearance of the first serial killer in Chicago. Formerly the director of a Fonds regional d’art contemporain (FRAC), Midal took an avid interest in design and the social issues it raises while writing her PhD thesis in Princeton. Often stemming from pop culture, her case studies are strategically chosen to undo some of design theory’s authoritative hierarchies. Midal, who is also a professor in the Space and Communication Master, explores the flaws of history and reconsiders its founding stories. All the while, she ponders the contemporary inflation of design, a conquering discipline which ceaselessly appropriates new fields of expertise.  

Gene Ray (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) calls for a post-modernism that would fully overcome capitalist modernity and its catastrophes. From a reading of Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History and Trauerspiel, Ray invokes allegory as an operational mode likely to save the relics of lost fights and inspire future struggles. Art—thought of as a knowledge that uses not only reason but also the senses—must collect these relics lest they become the trophies of the ruling class: in the apocalypse-stricken aboriginal people of America and the devastating effects of the ecological crisis, Ray sees the consequences of the modern progress it pursues. Ray’s sharp reflections follow the completion of the The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (TAAG) HEAD-FNS collective research project, in which Ray took part. Amongst other things, TAAG put the little “green” Geneva back into the entanglement of the Anthropocene’s planetary perturbations through movies, documents, and interviews made by artist researchers.

Every month, Ambroise Tièche excavates a notable lecture that was given at the HEAD – Geneva in a more or less distant past. Most of the video recordings he uses have never been made public. A Visual Arts teacher and artist, Tièche comments on his choices, explaining the interest of these discourses in relation to contemporary art and design. Third chapter: Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux on Incoherents from the specific viewpoint of an artist-researcher.

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 choice of a duo of female artists, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, to represent Switzerland. It also tackles other commitments from Laubard, notably within the framework of the Nouveaux Commanditaires project, which supports citizens commissioning a public artwork. Laubard defends her vision of art as collective creation rather than the expression of an individual genius, and as social factor rather than autoreferential practice.

It took Claude Barras ten years to complete his first full-length animation film My Life as a Courgette (2016), which tells the story of a young, round-faced, big-eyed orphan boy. The film was awarded two Césars. Talking with Delphine Jeanneret, from the Cinema department, and Myriam Poiatti, from the Visual Communication’s Image/Story minor, Barras offers an insight into the making of this little epic, which was made using modelling-clay puppets. The talk is dotted with preliminary videos and drawings, giving an understating of the overall production process from scenario and storyboard to dubbing, animation and shooting, as well as the collective dimension of such a project. Barras also evokes his previous illustration works, talks about Georges Schwizgebel’s influence on his decision to work with animation, and discusses his latest film project, about an orang-utan in the Borneo rainforest.