Artist
Olga Cafiero
Olga Cafiero (*1982) is a Swiss and Italian photographer based in Lausanne. After a BA in photography and an MA in art direction at ECAL, she studied art history at University of Lausanne. Her work has been shown in exhibitions in Switzerland and internationally since 2008, and regularly published in international magazines since 2009. Her awards include Foam Talent (selection), Hyères Festival de Mode et de Photographie, BFF-Förderpreis (laureate), a Swiss Design Award (laureate) and L’enquête photographique Neuchâteloise (laureate).
Flora Neocomensis
Within the frame of the project (the Enquête Neuchâteloise) I was awarded by the Canton of Neuchâtel, I propose a census and an image presentation of the flora of the canton setting them within a strong historical context, going back and forth with the past. I have been wandering for almost one year in the Neuchâtel area with my camera in search of its flowers. I have unearthed more than 160 specimens out of the more than 2,300 currently counted. The status of these flowers - considered common, protected, invasive or even extinct - guided my visual approach and led me to develop seven photographic series in which I have brought together several disciplines and their different perspectives on nature in a fertile crossroads. Botany, scientific imagery, and history have informed my approach and nourished my explorations as much as the prospecting of my own walks. The result is a singular corpus, with multiple and unexpected facets, as rigorous in its inventory and identification of plant species as it is poetic and complex in its visual languages.
The two artists selected by Photo Elysée for FUTURES in 2024 are Olga Cafiero and Thaddé Comar. Both studied in Lausanne and have been followed by the museum since their early works. Both break with conventional representations to explore our relationship to history and memory through powerful visual approaches.
In Flora Neocomensis, Olga Cafiero explores a specific regional heritage (the Canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland) by investigating its relationship with its flora. She creates an herbarium that combines botany, scientific imagery and history. She condenses visual languages and approaches to nature in a new poetic and meticulous inventory of a living heritage. Thaddé Comar focuses on the link between images and information in a context of resistance. Can we still trust images? In How was your dream?, he aims to deliver a new perspective on the 2019 revolts in Hong Kong and provides a strictly visual testimony.
Both Cafiero and Comar share a common practice which takes its meaning through hanging and editing, where images find a shape through matter and textures. They stand at fertile crossroads between various visual approaches and synthesise them, with the intention of bringing new perspectives to the viewer.