After spending the whole winter in a makeshift camp with a tarpaulin separating my bed from the cold outside world…I’m absolutely delighted to finally have the chance to slam the door in your face!
That door was a real burden; I nearly went blind from using a battered welding helmet. I shed a lot of tears in the process..
In the end, it weighs ten times too much, and I could have spared myself a lot of trouble if I’d simply trusted myself instead of listening to all the well-meaning advice I was given…
But now it’s done, and even though I’d do it all differently if I had the chance to start over, I’m actually quite happy and proud of it!
I don’t know how to draw up a plan and that often works against me, but I love metalwork; I love finding solutions to problems I hadn’t anticipated… even if it drives me mad sometimes…
#metalwork #industrial #handmadefurniture #metalconstruction #diy
A year and a half ago, I was hired to shoot the cover for Marechal’s album.
The shoot took place in a riding arena near Geneva. Photographing someone on horseback with a real studio set-up was an experience that was as stimulating as it was unique.
The first challenge was figuring out how to hang and stretch an 8 × 5 metre backdrop — a real challenge in this type of space. We also didn’t know how Lucifer, the horse, would react to the flashes. Fortunately, he tolerated them quite well, even though he was clearly not the posing type.
Thanks to the professionalism and commitment of everyone involved in the shoot, we were able to overcome these constraints. We are now very happy to be able to share the final result with you.
The album has just been released, and Marechal is playing tonight at L’Écurie for they release party !
Thank you @m.a.r.e.c.h.a.l for giving me the opportunity to do this work !
Front cover:
Set design, photography, post-production: @kleiothomas
Concept and graphic design: Bruno Charbonnaz @ giganto.ch
Models: @malik_likma_malik & Lucifer
Professional horse caretaker : Sarah Feliciangeli
Backdrop created by @backdrop.associates
Reverse side cover:
Collage by Bruno charbonnaz & @fred_fivaz
Typography: Malik Ramallo
#albumcoverdesign #albumcover #horsephotography
Robert the scrap giant
Art as habitat.
In the Wagenburg, so-called outsider art is embedded in everyday life. The works are not conceived as autonomous pieces, but as extensions of a lived space.
Recycled materials are central — metal, wood, plastics, industrial remnants, abandoned objects. The aesthetic is often raw, sometimes chaotic, reinforcing the marginal, non-academic nature of these works.
What emerges are not clear narratives, but personal symbols, individual mythologies, dystopian imaginaries. Not meant to be immediately legible — but to be inhabited.
#OutsiderArt #MarginalArt #RawArt
#analogphotography #hasselblad
The wagenburg is characterized by a fragmented and improvisational aesthetic. This logic can be linked to the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of “War Machine” (Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 1980), which refers to an organization operating outside the state order. The wagenburg is a space in the making, a shifting arrangement with no master plan. It is a fluid, reactive, nomadic architecture that resists the logic of fixity and land profitability.
@ralf_marsault in his magnificent book on visual anthropology, Résistance à l’effacement (2010), traced the emergence of Wagenburgs back to the early 1990s in Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He says in Berlin, the prospect of reunification and the return of the city’s status as capital triggered real estate speculation, leading to the eviction of many squatters. They reorganized themselves by occupying urban wastelands, where they set up trailers and trucks.
Wagenburgs then gradually spread to many European countries as a form of resistance to the commodification of cities and the rigidity of bourgeois housing models. Far from being a simple refuge or a marginal choice, the Wagenburg can be analyzed as a genuine aesthetic-political device. It proposes a form of living that redefines the regimes of spatiality, visibility, and subjectivity by blurring the boundaries between habitat and creation.
In Geneva, it is part of the broader context of urban struggles and alternative movements that have marked the city since the 1980s. During this period, Geneva saw strong mobilization around the right to housing and the illegal occupation of vacant buildings. The squatting movement became a central player in urban protest, proposing forms of collective, self-managed, and politicized housing in direct opposition to speculative and institutional logic.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this movement entered a phase of decline. Evictions increased, legal frameworks became stricter, and some of the alternative spaces were either institutionalized or dismantled. It was in this context that our wagenburg emerged as a form of displacement of occupation practices.
#analogphotography #kodakfilm #hasselblad
Last September, we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Wagenplatz, where I live.
From the moment I arrived in this space, producing images became a necessity that has never left me. It was not simply a documentary gesture, but an attempt at preservation. The Wagenburg is, by its very nature, a precarious space, constantly threatened with disappearance or transformation. The forms it generates—architectural, social, human—are unstable and often destined to fade away without a trace.
Photography has thus established itself as both an archival tool and a critical medium. Photographing this place and those who inhabit it is tantamount to preserving the memory of a way of life that escapes the institutional frameworks of urban planning and official history.
On the occasion of this anniversary, I would like to open this archive and share these images in order to place them in a broader perspective and recontextualise this way of life. The Wagenburg is a fundamentally fluid space, shaped by successive constructions and reconstructions, arrivals and departures, and constantly evolving uses. Over the years, I have paid particular attention to the gestures, relationships and intermediate spaces that make up its reality, as well as the artistic forms that develop there. Preserving images affirms the existence of this place in time, but also produces a counter-narrative to the dominant discourses on the city, housing and the norm.
In 2014, I produced a photographic serie entitled « Territoire », which presented a selection of these images. Taken from a much larger body of work, built up and enriched over the last twelve years, I felt it necessary to make them visible today, before they disappear forever into the digital vortex of my hard drives—like most of my artistic work, stifled by a lack of institutional support and resources.
#analogphotography #sinarphoto #kodakfilm #wagenplatzgeneva #punklife
When I came back to live in Wagenburg four years ago, I had to start all over again.
I was lucky enough to be given a magnificent Mowag truck! It hadn’t been moved for ten years and was rusting away.
The second photo shows my truck, looking great, after the work I did on it. But before I got to that point, I spent two months working to insulate the beast and get it back into shape.
The third photo shows the interior of the truck as I found it.
The following photos show the insulation work I did, laying the floor and making the windows.
What was in place of the windows were actually just openings with Plexiglas that had been boarded up.
I removed them and made proper windows with metal frames.
#wagenplatz #trucklifestyle #metalwork #mowagtruck
This photo of Ciara Thompson brushing her teeth in front of the Garage squat is, for me, emblematic of the whole Lyon squatting adventure.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my unconditional love for this woman, a true punk diva of soul music, singer @thebuttshakers . Ciara is one of the most intelligent and talented people I know. I have always admired her for her strength of character, her integrity and her inexhaustible musical culture.
To pursue my little story..
After La Tuile, we opened a flat connected to an old garage that had not been used for at least 30 years, judging by the equipment that had been left behind and had not been moved.
We met a Rom family and, after putting them up for a while, we decided to let them have the house and find another one for ourselves.
We found a magnificent building in Croix-Rousse that was due to be demolished. Most of the flats had been sealed off with reinforced anti-squatter doors. Only two or three flats were still occupied on the seven floors. We decided to open the flat on the top floor via the attic. We simply made a hole in the floor and built a trapdoor to access. After a while, as the place was really grim and we had no electricity, we said to ourselves, ‘why not go and see what the flat below looks like!’. So we made another hole. After many long hours of work, our little mouse efforts finally paid off! The flat below had very high ceilings. We rappelled down using electrical cables. The flat was incredible, very bright, with large windows and mouldings on the ceiling. And best of all, it had electricity! We were delighted.
We stayed there for months without anyone noticing us. Then we got too greedy. Our friends opened up other floors, and they were spotted, and so were we...
La Tuile
I moved to Lyon in 2008 to study political science and anthropology. After six month of study and six months of strikes at university, I was thinking to move to Berlin and left the flat I was sharing. As the year wasn’t over yet, a friend from university put me in touch with some of her friends who were squatting in an apartment on Rue des Feuillants and who could put me up for a while... That’s where I met Ciara, and it was love at first sight. I decided to stay.
The flat was great. It was quiet. My flatmates had already been there for a year.
I remember it was hot, and everyone was walking around shirtless.
When I arrived at the squat, I didn’t have my own room, so I slept in the living room on a sofa that my flatmates had picked up.
Every night, as soon as I turned off the light, I would get bitten, and I quickly realised that the sofa was infested with bedbugs.
They spread throughout the entire flat.
As we couldn’t get rid of them, we decided to move.
That was the beginning of a long series of squatting and evictions.
We found a nice empty house in the 3rd arrondissement that had a demolition notice.
After scouting it out for a while, we opened the house and barricaded ourselves inside.
It was winter and we had no heating.
We went to a second-hand shop and we all bought ourselves some 1980s ski suits.
We spent the winter in our ski suits in our amazing house.
When the owner found out we were there, he sent some thugs to put pressure on us.
Then, as we weren’t ready to move, he brought in a crane and had the tiles removed from the roof.
But then we set about re-tiling the roof.
As the owner’s attempts to evict us had failed and the winter truce was over, he filed a complaint and we had to move out again...
Ten years later, the house was still there, still empty, perhaps even today... like most of the squats from which we were evicted..
After some years living in squats in Lyon, I came back in Geneva. I lived with a friend for a little while then I moved to a Wagenplatz. This way of living has always attracted me for the freedom and creativity it allow. When I arrived on the site, I was 22 years old and the only girl; all the other residents were men more than 10 years older than me. I found a 6 meter red construction trailer, the same that I had seen in my dreams. It was the first time in my life that I felt at home. It was my refuge, and I felt good there for years. It wasn’t easy being a girl in this male environment. But my boyfriend at the time was very supportive and taught me a lot, particularly his passion for blacksmithing and foundry work. I learned a great deal from this way of life. I learned how to use all the basic tools for construction and, above all, I learned to fend for myself. I lived there for six years. During that time, I acquired another 8-metre trailer, which I connected to the first one. And my little living space became a kingdom.
When I had to leave this place for certain reasons, I had to abandon it all.
This picture is the only photo I got of my home back then. It was at the very beginning, one or two years after I moved into my red trailer.
Retour sur Fata Morgana, une œuvre réalisée au FMAC dans le cadre des ateliers Godzillab avec une équipe d’enfants de 7 à 12 ans.
Pendant une semaine, la Serre du FMAC s’est transformée en atelier vivant, donnant naissance à un diorama monumental: une cité onirique, mirage architectural de carton où l’espace devient théâtre, un lieu où la mémoire se rejoue et s’invente et où l’imaginaire se tisse avec la continuité des formes qui traversent l’histoire.
Merci à Estelle Germain @associationgodzillab pour l’invitation et au @fmac.geneve pour l’accueil!
Merci à @backdrop.associates pour le fond en peinture sur toile que l’on aperçoit sur la photo n2.
A look back at Fata Morgana, a work created at the FMAC as part of the Godzillab workshops with a team of children aged 7 to 12.
For a week, the FMAC space called « la Serre » was transformed into a living workshop, giving birth to a monumental diorama: a dreamlike city, an architectural mirage made of cardboard where space becomes a theater, a place where memory is replayed and reinvented, and where the imagination is woven with the continuity of forms that span history.
