Photo documentary set in a deserted Geneva during the G8 counter-summit in 2003. The series stages the abandonment of the urban space and its transformation through the deployment of defense barricades.
“During the G8 summit in Evian in June 2003, alterglobalists organized a
large protest demonstration in Geneva. In anticipation of possible
overflows, merchants in the city centre took some precautions... The
result is surprising, it allowed me to realize this photographic report on
these astonishing constructions which emphasize the urban architectural
space. This photographic work associates the moment of emptiness to the
fixed framing of an architectural image. It is a fiction about
abandonment, escape.”
Jacques Berthet
Published following the exhibition “Un art de la disparition – Rumeurs sur
la ville” at Centre de la photographie Genève, from March 4 to
May 8, 2016.
Jacques Berthet (born 1949 in Troinex, Switzerland, lives and works in
Geneva) began
photography
in the early 1980s, after practicing drawing and decorative arts. He is
one of the founding members of the
Centre
de la photographie Genève in 1984. His photographs are arranged
according to the principle of the series. He is interested in
landscape
transformation and the
archiving
of industrial
architectural
memory. He explores for the authorities of Geneva the transformation of
urban planning around the city. From 1989 to 1991, for the 700th
anniversary of the Swiss Confederation, he photographs in the Swiss Alps,
factories, dams and mines, remains abandoned since the last war, a work
exhibited on numerous occasions and acclaimed by critics. Since then, in
parallel with his activities as a professional photographer, he has been
developing a poetic and formal research on different types of natures,
particularly the grasses: wanderers, slope grasses, moorland or wasteland.
The results of this research have been exhibited many times in Switzerland
and Europe.
