Artist
Thaddé Comar
Thaddé Comar, a Franco-Swiss photographer born in 1993, graduated with distinction from ECAL in Lausanne in 2018. His work is deeply intertwined with current events and social movements, reflecting a profound commitment to contemporary issues. Today, his portfolio spans from editorial to commissioned work, as well as personal projects where he delves into the nuances and facets of our ever-evolving society.
How was your dream?
« How was your dream ? » is a photographic project realized during the Hong Kong protests between June and October 2019. This work deals with new forms of demonstration and insurrection in our post-contemporary era dominated by seamless control societies. Five years before, in Hong Kong, the « Umbrella Movement » was quickly repressed by state and police violence. In 2019 the democratic uprising that began in May, gave itself the means to continue. Faced with a sophisticated arsenal of control (facial recognition, geolocation, carding, eavesdropping, infiltration, water cannons, tear gas, helicopter, sonic weapons, non-lethal rifles), the Hong Kong demonstrators have developed a repertoire of techniques based on principles of invisibility and intraceability (anonymity, lasers of blindness, pocket of faraday, vision by drones, masks of all kinds, encrypted communication etc…), allowing them to mitigate the effects of the repression. These new devices, which contribute to the transformation of the forms of struggle and resistance, however, push for the gradual erasure of individual singularities. In the future, will societies and sophisticated systems of control, force us to make our human singularities disappear? Will this be done in favor of a new common identity ?
In a period of our history where information and «truth» are concepts regularly questioned and widely debated by a certain number of political, economic and social actors. So much, that a large part of our population no longer knows which saint to follow. Who and what to believe. Information and its different stagings are a contemporary problem that I wish to question through this projects. If the informative image is often the result of a classic photo-journalistic practice which must answer criteria of ethics, objectivity and narration, the media that present these images are free to accompany the content with a number of textual and aesthetic elements. The link between the raw information and the environment can create an ambiguous content whose informative value can appear «corrupted». In response to these concerns, this project is part of a strong desire to provide a strictly visual testimony, in an artistic approach, including hangings and edition. I try to stand out from the classic representation of these events, and bring a new perspective to the viewer.
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.