Switzerland
Zoé
Aubry
Impact, in Search of (R)evolution
1815, Treaty of Vienna. The Jurassians attached to Bern revolt and fight to defend their independence, their French language, and their cultural and religious rights. The emerging movements are irredentist and separatist. 1978. After many years of struggle and a number of votes, plebiscites and sub-plebiscites dividing the Jura territory, part of it accedes to the status of Swiss township. Last to enter the Helvetic Confederation, Jura becomes the 26th Federated State. For certain municipalities that remained attached to Bern, the question of their belonging is still pending. As an expatriate Jurassian, Zoé Aubry’s approach to the independence struggle is drawn from her roots and history. Impact, in Search of [R]evolution uses the independence movement’s archives and suggests connections between the physical expressions of the antagonists and their held ideology. Employing a duality between icons and intimacies Aubry creates a circular collective memory found in the images. The remains and iconographic traces remember the vigour of the fight.
About Zoé
In its thinking form, Zoé Aubry’s work is freedom, worry, research, cohesion, connivance, juggling between critical, poetic and political dimensions. Based on anthropological investigations, her approach is built on a relationship between societal phenomena and individual experiences. By creating spaces of confrontation, her work is a criticism of contemporary society. Damaged, the anti-pictures of which she makes use, act, activate, arm, suture, recompose themselves in a collective movement. Aubry graduated from ECAL in photography, where she currently teaches, and from the Master in Contemporary Artistic Practices at HEAD-Geneva. In 2018, she won the Swiss Design Award, and the MBAL Relève Prize as part of the triennial of contemporary print art, and the Voies Off Contemporary Photography Awards|lacritique at the Rencontres d’Arles. Passionate about artist books, she has worked at the independent publishing house RVBbooks.
Learn more
To learn more about Zoé Aubry and her work visit www.z-aubry.com and follow her on Instagram: @aube_riz