fabrizio arena - photographer - swiss colours, fields

near gland, towards prangins

a long term photographic project based around the region of the lac léman, focusing on the colours and light of the ordinary and the everyday, offering a tender look towards the things and gestures and places we often take for granted. it is the result of three years of meanderings and explorations all around the lake and its surrounding landscape, and the conclusion of a long learning process that made me reconsider the way look and think about a place, and the means i use to photograph it. it recounts an attempt to understand the character of the region, that certain poetic nothingness that permeates it all, and how i have come to see it in relation to my daily life and the landscape that i lost three years ago.

this project is an ongoing endeavour that has taken the form of a book with showcasing 74 photographs from the over 3000 negatives taken for this project. this sequence is accompanied by a short text that opens it and that goes:

a reality tinted by the past
something so recent that’s lost
something a thousand years old still standing
lost geographies
seducing, still there
yet inaccessible
the night is now dead silent
the crickets are gone
silence save for the occasional motorbike
i sometimes hear them over the phone
squeaky frogs; compressed

as well as a prose-poem titled i've escaped that recounts my experience of exile and the way it has impacted my way of seeing what surrounds me.