Antoine Genoud

Image from “Champ-francey” project by Antoine Genoud

Biography

Instagram: @antoine.genoud

My name is Antoine Genoud. I’m from Bulle, Switzerland. I discovered photography around the age of 17 and quickly became passionate about it. I then joined the ECAL in Lausanne, where I’m currently studying. The school allows me to expand my practice and experiment across various fields: documentary, staged photography, performance, while always encouraging me to push my boundaries.

The project

I grew up in this house, the former farm of my great-great-grandparents, now transformed into a villa.

I lived there surrounded by objects that once had a specific use, but have since shifted in status: now silent witnesses of a bygone daily life, they are preserved with a certain tenderness, like memory-charged fetishes.

Beyond these objects, it was my grandmother’s stories that fascinated and still fascinate me. They make me dream, like so many tangible traces of a place now inhabited in a completely different way. They evoke for me a time, a time when this house was not yet a villa, a time when the daily life of its residents was entirely different, a time both near and distant, which I can’t help but idealize.

 “Champ-francey” playfully explores the relationship between the current inhabitants of this farm (my family and myself) and their connection to the past, through a physical and sensory engagement with these old objects.

This is done with the aim of questioning, more broadly, the transformation of rural areas, both materially and in our collective and personal imagination, and how we perceive them today.

Image from “Champ-francey” project by Antoine Genoud

Image from “Champ-francey” project by Antoine Genoud