‘I look inside from the outside, past the barriers, through draped
sheeting and jagged concrete walls. Insights and outlooks. Obstructed
views. Resistance and transparency. Change and transformation.
The only constant is the process.’
This is how Samuel Haettenschweiler describe the concept behind
Under construction until further notice, a project inspired by the
artist’s strolls through construction sites. For him, the construction
site is synonymous of urban mutation and impermanence. In his
studio, he translates impressions from these wanderings into models,
which continuously change, grow and disintegrate for the camera.
In between mounting and dismounting them, he photographs them,
layer by layer, with his smartphone. He thus shapes new wanderings
or, more precisely, a wandering gaze. He seeks visual moments
on the brink of abstraction, where spatiality is created by intimation,
crafting fragmented realities freed from pure functionality. He
prints the smartphone images before rephotographing them, which
results in a reduction of colour and surface, as well as an interplay
between digital and analogue in the final photographs. Scratches,
dust grains and print raster become inscribed as a new temporal layer
in the pictures.
The artist’s images are playful compositions, offering reinvented sceneries
from impressions he gathered during his walks. Highly graphical,
his photographs combine an abstract quality with a particular
physicality stemming from his specific working process.
