Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Atlas is my graduation's project of the Advanced Studies in Photography at the School of Photography of Vevey. It has been shown for the first time at the beginning of July, as a display of 280 pictures and a vitrine presenting the artist's book. The work will be part of a group show called "ARCHIVE. The photographic body" opening next September, 13, 2014 at exp12 in Berlin, presenting the work of Anna Meschiari next to Yann Haeberlin and Simon Rimaz, three swiss artist who studied at the School of Photography of Vevey. »Atlas is the name of the well known Titan that carried the heaven on his shoulders. It is also the name of the vertebra that supports the skull, one of the craters of the Moon, a satellite of Saturn, the largest butterfly of the world, a bodybuilder, a pizza, a condom, a car radio, a chain of mountains, of the well known work of Gerhard Richter,… Things and beings, places and works of art, by the name of Atlas through the world are countless – and more the images representing it circulation on the Internet. Some have retain me. A collection took shape. But what to a such a profusion? Titanic task… as infinite. My approach is that of an iconographer, archivist and collector, looking for a possible reading of the world through the multitude of images today to our scope. The realization, by printing, of the images known until that point as virtual one, changed their status. The materialized images reappropriated, acquires a new life. The reappropriation of the images (their processing, their arrangement) allows to resemble the one to the other and gives them lines, a common form, an air of family. An ephemeral display, as grid, reflects the creative process. It represents how the image collection was made and witnessed. It evokes the navigation on the ocean of web. The time dimension gives here the temporal extent of this undertaking. Appalling to the proportions of the Internet, at its disproportionate memory, an answer emerges, that of access to human scale, the story of an individual. The exposed images interact with each other, in a narrative that is reminiscent, in a wink, to the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg. If the display suggests the collection, a set of books, as extension, allows a neat picked, personal and singular. Atlas gives its name to many things through the World that the latter, in its broad widths, appears everywhere affected by this appellation. Therefore, the impression of universality closes this project to a imaginary mapping, or an atlas (or parody?) and raises the question of global sharing images. Atlas can contemplate the vault that he carries – a possible constellation, subjective, among many others.«