Finalist 2015
Simone Cavadini
Simone Cavadini, born in 1988 in Ticino, first studied Graphic Design in Lugano. He then graduated with an honors degree in Visual Communication and Photography at the Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL). Influenced by Italian culture, his work attempts to deconstruct instruments and systems of modern society.
His work has notably been exposed at the Swiss Photo Award (2012), the New York Photo Award (2013/2014), and at the PhotoforumPasquArt prize (2015). He currently lives and works in Paris.
His work has notably been exposed at the Swiss Photo Award (2012), the New York Photo Award (2013/2014), and at the PhotoforumPasquArt prize (2015). He currently lives and works in Paris.
RES PVBLICA, 2013
This project analyses the relationship between entertainment and power within Italian media. It is made up of large photographs of two studio sets (Mediasets), the largest Italian private television network, property of Silvio Berlusconi, in Rome and Milan.
My approach: a photograph taken with a large format view camera, seeks to show the specific scheme of optical vibration in these impressive settings. Their highly baroque structures, their rhetoric full of economic well-being, their saturated colours and their powerful lighting are intended to immerse the spectators and the audience in a visual excess, which aims to deprive them of subjectivity, or in other words, make the audience lose their experience of self-awareness. One may see in this form of hyper entertainment a close companion to the « panem et circenses » of the Roman circus. Through a power game that offered entertainment to the people, it ensured their consensus. These means of power have an alienating effect by substituting themselves to the subjective reality of the spectators.
Through my approach, I try to suggest a critical look at entertainment in our society, on the line of specific concepts developed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his work « What is an apparatus? ». My choice to use a photographic representation aims at stopping the frenetic rhythm of television images in order to analyse their settings. My act is a profanation of the appearance system, which is produced by these apparatus. Finally, my project attempts to open the way to an appropriation of the apparatus, thus fighting the process of disobjectification that the latter produces.
My approach: a photograph taken with a large format view camera, seeks to show the specific scheme of optical vibration in these impressive settings. Their highly baroque structures, their rhetoric full of economic well-being, their saturated colours and their powerful lighting are intended to immerse the spectators and the audience in a visual excess, which aims to deprive them of subjectivity, or in other words, make the audience lose their experience of self-awareness. One may see in this form of hyper entertainment a close companion to the « panem et circenses » of the Roman circus. Through a power game that offered entertainment to the people, it ensured their consensus. These means of power have an alienating effect by substituting themselves to the subjective reality of the spectators.
Through my approach, I try to suggest a critical look at entertainment in our society, on the line of specific concepts developed by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his work « What is an apparatus? ». My choice to use a photographic representation aims at stopping the frenetic rhythm of television images in order to analyse their settings. My act is a profanation of the appearance system, which is produced by these apparatus. Finally, my project attempts to open the way to an appropriation of the apparatus, thus fighting the process of disobjectification that the latter produces.
© Simone Cavadini