Artist
Federico Berardi
Federico Berardi, a graduate of ECAL (University of Art & Design of Lausanne), is a Swiss-born artist and still life photographer living between Paris and Switzerland. His work explores photography’s potential for creating illusion, while interrogating the technical boundaries of commercial and fine art photography.
Las Vegas
In the recent years, I focused on documenting the Afghan conflict by infiltrating a group of British soldiers on training in the ski resort of Verbier, Switzerland. These
soldiers, coming back from Afghanistan, are participating in Exercise White Knights, organized since 1983 by the Royal Armoured Corp. Every day for a serviceman during the afghan conflict is potentially his last. To get emotional support, in an exclusively masculine environment, those young men have developed strong human relation, a particular sense of humour and rituals.
During the months I have spent with them, I have learnt some of their tatoos’ significations, slangs, rituals, and gained access to 4500 photographs taken in the conflict zone. The result of this investigation is a complex mix of different kinds of images questioning the concepts of virility, self-representation, men identity, homo and heterosexuality.
At the boundaries of document and art, the 'Lash Vegas' series question the fragmented vision created by photography, since combats and destruction are totally absent from the database of those collected images. Their black aspect is coming from a temporary vision disorder described by one of the soldiers after being injured
by a roadside bomb: a claustrophobic sensation of "seeing through a black veil, like the objects and the environment were absorbing the light".