RESEARCH PHOTO COMPETITION AT THE GENEVA GRADUATE INSTITUTE

Fenced In
In November 2019, Hong Kong Polytechnical University’s campus was under siege. Protestor and the police violently clashed on these streets for several days, with over 1’400 students being arrested by the police. Following the siege, a large increase in fences, barriers and regulations surrounded and completely changed the campus.

Taken Away 
The University of Hong Kong’s Democracy Wall used to be a vibrant space for exchange of thought and debate. Students could freely post flyers, posters, or notes on the board. With the 2020 National Security Law and the dissolution of the student union, the original content of the board has been taken away, and is now tightly regulated and surveilled by CCTV cameras, while still proclaiming to be a “Democracy Wall”.

Finding Shelter
In the wake of the of Hong Kong’s National Security Law independent “yellow” (pro-democracy) bookstores take on an important community space for pro-democracy citizens to find shelter for their beliefs and defiance, as organized political efforts are cracked down upon. They often display books and art which resists the censorship in a subtle and indirect way. 

Interaction?
With her arm behind her back, a woman walks alone to the protest site, displaying political banners to passing cars instead of taking the bus with her fellow protesters.

Extraordinary ordinariness
Protesters engage in small talk in front of a line of security guards as they wait for the protest to begin after arriving at the gate of the military base. Their everyday struggle blurs the line between protest and daily life.
 

Possibility of resistance
Three police officers drag a protester away from the gate of the military base. Without flailing, he continues to hold a political banner that reads, 'No to the construction of the new military base in Henoko.

Karamoja Pastoralists: The Four

Leary but inquisitive, a brief exchange followed and the group of four agreed to let me photograph. © Ravi Bhavnani

Karamoja Pastoralists: Two of the Four

The expressions and style of the two young men, pitted against the stunning landscape, made for a compelling portrait. © Ravi Bhavnani

Karamoja Pastoralists: The Four with Me

After breaking the ice, the proverbial "selfie" followed -- a few smiles discernible. © Ravi Bhavnani

El motocarro, Stolen Time Series, March 2025, Acandí, Colombia. © Nora Doukkal 

They have seen the layers of waiting accumulate. Their own, when they were on the road, then  those of other migrants, as they served food at distribution points, and as they guided them, in  turn, for part of the journey through the jungle. In Acandí, the categories of migrant,  humanitarian actor, and guide sometimes blur. 

Espera el turno, Stolen Time, March 2025, Acandi, Colombia. © Nora Doukkal

Some afternoons stretched around the main albergue (settlement) and outside medical centers.  Endurance is required to get a consultation when you don’t have the right status. Sometimes,  this leads to absurd situations, like giving birth in a hallway.

Pesca, Stolen Time, March 2025, Acandí, Colombia. © Nora Doukkal

Waiting is also about speculation, drifting off in thought. We tell ourselves we’d rather be  somewhere else than standing in line. Fishing, for example — yes, going fishing would be nice. 

Summer storm

Berlin. Football allows for an instant of respite and to engage with friends in a game that permit to momentarily disengage from harsh realities of lack of legal protection or exploitative labour conditions. People cross the city even in times of heavy police control and ubiquitous arrests, to play football for an hour or two. In those moments, much can be shared and conveyed through gestures, sometimes more comfortably than through words. 

The touch of cloth

Istanbul. Two friends pose in new clothes, pirāhan tunbān, which have been brought to them from Afghanistan by a relative. They compare the embroidery in the sleeves and collars before putting them on. The hands that have stitched this dress are familiar to them. Here the moment of intimacy remains between the two friends, as their faces cannot be disclosed. Not wanting to disclose their identity which could put them at risk for want of papers, I have drawn their faces, as I frequently did during my research, often from memory, leading to games of guessing and recognizing among my interlocutors.

Kafa duman – Head smoke

Istanbul. Neither religiously proscribed nor socially applauded, smoking nargileh/shisha/qailun is something that is done often only within the intimacy of circles of friends. It is a moment of sharing where ample amounts of food are dished out, at the generous expense of the host. Music is played, and friends and relatives sing songs in Persian and Turkish, like the hit Kafa Duman by Hünkar Göksu. “Head smoke”—an analogy for inebriation, a hazy mind, altered senses somewhere between a much-desired escape, and a scary loss of control. For a few months in 2023 it was all anyone would sing, and the melody echoes again in my head, even when most of these people have been arrested and deported by the Turkish police with EU (and Swiss) funding. 

Carolina Fontes / Marcha das Margaridas (2023)
 

CarolinaFontes / Exchange of seeds and knowledge (2023)
 

CarolinaFontes / Pelo Bem Viver (For the Good Living - 2023)

“Mothers, Migrants, Researchers” 

In the heart of a slum in Southeast Delhi, Rohingya mothers stand at the intersection  of many identities—migrants, Muslims, and women. But in this moment, they are something  more: researchers, guides, and co-creators of knowledge, leading the way as they shape the  course of my project. Not only do they navigate the everyday challenges of life—tracking the  unpredictable water supply, securing spots for their shops, negotiating with police, and  speaking with immigration officials—but they also became active collaborators in my research:  identifying participants, spreading the word, promoting the project, and offering invaluable  feedback on my questions. Captured in this moment, a few Rohingya mothers are showing me  the way forward. 
Captured in November 2023 
 

“Motherly Waiting” 

Captured on a cold winter afternoon in Delhi, inside her home in a refugee camp, a  Rohingya mother waits eagerly at the threshold of her jhuggi (a slum dwelling)—not for  asylum, not for recognition, but simply for her daughter to return from work. The everyday life  of refugees is not only shaped by crisis and displacement, but also by quiet moments of care,  reflection, patience, and motherly worries. 
Captured in November 2023
 

 Ghar (translation: home) 

In the Rohingya refugee camps of Delhi, electricity is unreliable. During the  scorching summer, even as the arid loo winds envelop the city, often, homes are without light  or ventilation. Darkness fills every corner, so dense that even your eyes take time to adjust.  And yet—this is a home: lived in, loved in, and gradually adorned over the years. The door in  the far end is a gateway to a Rohingya family’s everyday life in displacement. 
Captured in May 2023
 

Conquering the field: a young player from the Aigles de la Médina preparing for training (Stade de la Medina, Dakar, 31 January 2023).
While men's football in Senegal remains the nation's pride and joy, the Lionesses are making their mark on the national stage with political recognition for their recent success at the 2022 African Cup of Nations and their victory at the 2023 UFOA A. Ten days before the Women's Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco in 2022, the Lionesses received the national flag from the Minister of Sport, Matar Ba. But it is the new media coverage of this ceremony that is noteworthy. Similarly, before their departure for the World Cup qualifiers in Auckland, the names of each of the players were published and the matches were broadcast live on the FIFA website.
It is also against a backdrop of greater social acceptance that a career in football is now seen by young players and their families as a symbol of socio-economic success and recognition.
 

The edge of the pitch: staying in the game. Former professional player talking to a coach during girls' training (Stade de la Medina, Dakar, 31 January 2023).
Despite structural inequalities in funding for women's football compared to men's football and access to long-term employment, a process of professionalisation is underway.
This process has a generational dimension. The generation of women in their forties offers a profile of former players who are trying to pursue their ‘passion’ in coaching and/or management roles in clubs. 
Nevertheless, it seems that professionalisation, even for those who have combined training with maintaining a position in the sport, requires dealing with men who remain omnipresent and claim to have played a founding role in the development of women's football. The discourse of former players is mixed and ambivalent, torn between the need to maintain harmony for the common cause and a sense of injustice.
 

Paving the way for the future: new equipment and training for young girls in a school in the working-class neighbourhood of Yoff (Dakar, Senegal, 1 February 2023).
For women who are professionals and/or committed to the development of women's football, this must be achieved through its promotion from an early age, particularly through schools and through the law, i.e. non-discrimination in playing. They are very aware of their commitment, and those in their forties consider that they have paved the way for the younger generation. They demonstrate determination, passion and dedication to achieving this mission in the future, with an ethic of overcoming obstacles and perseverance that is embedded in the practice of sport.

Among the Stacks. 
Ricardo Seitenfus (class of 1972 at the Institut africain de Genève) looking for one of the books he wrote at his home in Arroio do Tigre, Brazil. © NicolasHafner

Indexing. 
The backbone of Ricardo Seitenfus’ PhD thesis, defended at the Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales in 1981. © NicolasHafner

Consciousness.
Ana María Arteaga (class of 1974 at the Institut d’études du développement) shows me a booklet about education for democracy she co-authored during the military dictatorship in 1980s Chile. © NicolasHafner
 

Tailor working in a company self-managed by its employees. © Marc Hufty (2024)
 

Worker in a recicladores company who lives off the basurero in Buenos Aires because he cannot find formal work. © Marc Hufty (2024)

These demonstrators are ‘Trabajadores sin empleo’. © Marc Hufty (2024)

Here, She Still Holds the Names
Parveena Ahangar, Half-Mother and founder of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), sits beneath the names of the Enforced Disappeared. For over thirty years, she has come to this room — not only to remember, but because others still come. They speak. They wait. They ask. And she listens. Her presence is not what remains. It is what continues: a daily act of witness, a demand for justice, and a space where others wait with her.
Referring to God, she says softly:
“वो है — देर है, अंधेर नहीं।”
He is there. There is a delay, but not darkness.
 

Grief in the Fold
“मेरा काम ही यही है,” she said. Each morning, Parveena Ahangar (Jiji) enters the APDP office and prepares the space — folding clothes, arranging what will be needed for the day. The room no longer gathers protest, but it still gathers people. In the quiet that followed 2019, speech has been replaced by repetition. This is where grief sits now: in gestures done without announcement, in care that asks for nothing, in a room made ready — again and again.
 

Named, Drawn, Refused to Be Erased
On a low table inside the APDP office, the faces of the Enforced Disappeared look back — drawn, named, and kept. These postcards are part of a practice that has long resisted the erasure of the disappeared by returning their images to the room. They are not memorials. They are quiet assertions of presence, offered without announcement. In a space where speech has been subdued, these faces remain — not as reminders of what was lost, but of what must still be accounted for.
 

The rose. © Théo Lefort

Sahel, an young Afghan man working undocumented in Istanbul, enjoys the roses of  Süleymaniye mosque’s garden during one of his rare outings. Police control has made it more  and more risky to go outside. Istanbul, 2021 

The map.  © Théo Lefort

At my request, Sahel has drawn his journey, writing every country from Afghanistan to  France, and the biggest risks he faces. Alongside soldiers and deportation, he added the  deserts, forests and crocodiles he encountered while crossing borders. Istanbul, 2021 

The cemetery.  © Théo Lefort

At the border between Iran and Turkey, the “cemetery of those who have no one” hosts  the often unidentified remains of people on the move who have perished while crossing the  border mountains, due to snow, exhaustion or police violence. Van, 2021. 

Can suyu (first watering)

Exposing the contradiction of regional development policy and insecurity, we see a major dam part of the Southeastern Anatolia Project that enables cotton irrigation by diverting the water of the Euphrates River.

Confrontation of past and present

The juxtaposition of an abandoned Armenian church, two individuals operating a drone on its roof, and the rising tip of a minaret captures the region’s layered past and present, shaped by ongoing struggles over power, identity, and transformation.

Surviving amidst the cracks

A cracked wall, left by the February 2023 earthquake, extending from a living room sofa, reflects the experiences of agricultural workers who are navigating natural disasters and everyday life.

Liminal Light: Where Movement Finds Direction
A solitary lighthouse splits the horizon, its beam framed by water and sky. This image  represents mobilities—not just physical motion, but the emotional, temporal, and infrastructural  pathways migrants traverse. As global south-to-north journeys unfold across liminal spaces, this  beacon becomes a metaphor for uncertain direction, hope, and the ethics of movement. It reminds us that mobility is rarely free; it is navigated through systems of risk, resistance, and resilience. 
 

Paper Borders and Stateless Voices 
Inside a Geneva meeting room, the ink of policymaking spills across notebooks, while screens  display remote participation. This image captures migration as a construct of governance— abstracted in formal settings yet rooted in lived experience. Here, decisions about migrant lives  are debated without their presence. The photo foregrounds questions of representation, legality, and power: Who speaks? Who decides? And who remains invisible in the bureaucratized  imagination of migration? 
 

The Arch of Asylum: Borders Etched in Stone 
A man walks his dog beneath Geneva’s historic inscription: “Cité de Refuge.” This ordinary scene  masks an extraordinary tension: borders. The stone relief speaks to Geneva’s legacy of asylum,  yet today’s bordering practices are increasingly exclusionary. This image juxtaposes permanence  and movement, past and present, asking what remains of refuge in an era of securitized migration.  As Agamben suggests, the camp and the city may now be two sides of the same sovereign logic. 

Understand 
My collection is inspired by Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album. This photo is titled  Understand because in the same way that music or a smile is understood by all human beings  regardless of their background or nationality, my wish is for a similar understanding to prevail  on the question of justice and equitable global development. The image represents musical artists from different nationalities whose music was understood by all.

What’s Going On: Power-Plays 
Inspired by the song What’s Going On, in international investment law power plays are what is  going on.

Mindgames 
ISDS and its impact on the sovereignty of developing States is a mindgame matter. Investors  use the threat of arbitration which is costly for developing States to get their way regarding  regulatory amendments they are not in support of. 

SHIELDING GODS AND GODDESSES

In the weeks leading up to Basant Panchami, idols of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and fine arts, are prepared for Saraswati pujo (worship) on Kolkata’s streets. A Kolkata Police’s barricade shields the exposed deities, not unlike how the deified political powers are shielded elsewhere in the country. © Riddhi Pandey

CONFINING PROTEST

In the heart of New Delhi, the Jantar Mantar protest site is shrinking as these mobile police barricades close in on the protesters at this designated protest space in the world’s largest democracy. Layers upon layers of barricades are effectively blocking the sights and muffling the sounds of protest. © Riddhi Pandey

MAINTAINING ORDER

Located in the farthest corner of India’s island territories, in the tourist town of Port Blair, these barricades of the Andaman and Nicobar Police mimic the national capital’s barricades, both in their physical appearance and in their functionality. Barricades are not just visual and material proxies to police personnel; they also occupy space and order citizens’ movement. © Riddhi Pandey
 

Mosaic
Terrace cultivation is a system of cultivation that is iconic to the Angami and Chakhesang tribes of Nagaland. This image exemplifies how creativity in land use is well integrated into the ways people envision their landscapes. 

Jhumia
Jhum (slash-and-burn) traditional system of cultivation has been at the forefront of debates around climate change and land degradation. The state continues to demonise this form of land use to promote new systems of agroforestry. Indigenous farmers and local conservationists, on the other hand critique this stance given its importance to local food security and biodiversity while calling for a more sustainable approach to preserving this ancient system of land use. 

Resisting Change
The pressure on land with a growing population has reduced flat-land agriculture in newly developing cities in Nagaland. Kezha, my interlocutor tells me “It is hard to continue this system of land use with constructions closing in on my family’s agricultural land.”
 

Exhibition shown at the UN Headquarters in New York

Major General Patrick Gauchat –UNTSO Head of Mission and Chief of Staff – poses in front of an exhibition board during a high-level symposium on peace missions organized by the UN Department of Peace Operations in May 2024. The exhibition discusses how Switzerland engages with UN peace missions and highlights Maj. Gen. Gauchat as the first senior Swiss military officer to lead a UN peacekeeping operation. It was shown at the UN Headquarters in New York, in partnership with the Permanent Mission of Switzerland.

 Private tour at the 2024 SIPRI Forum

Chiara Lanfranchi (Student Researcher on the project) gives a private tour of the project’s exhibition in Spanish at the 2024 SIPRI Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. The exhibition engages the audience around key trends and debates related to UN peace missions, inviting them to watch videos of scholars and experts from the contexts where missions are deployed and to quiz themselves. It was shown in 13 locations in and outside Switzerland, and remains accessible on digital platforms. 

Exhibition at the UN Office in Geneva (UNOG)

Sara Hellmüller (project PI) delivers a speech on linking research and practice on UN peace missions at the exhibition’s opening ceremony at the UN Office in Geneva (UNOG) in November 2024. She was joined by the UNOG Chef de Cabinet and Swiss Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the UN, who sponsored the hosting of the exhibition.   

Kitchen as a “workspace” [January 3, 2025, Hooghly, West Bengal, India]

Social reproductive labour and care work have never been accounted for when measuring growth and development, and the current neoliberal system/structure rests on the invisibilisation of care work. The aim is to change how we view the household, or the “private sphere” as not spaces just for rejuvenation but also as spaces for labour.
 

Laboured Hands [February 12, 2025, Bishnupur, West Bengal, India]

This picture depicts three generations of women who continue to perform social reproductive labour in their households. Caring for each other, trying to soothe their callouses, they hold hands in solidarity. The picture is coloured black and white purposefully, as women across the world have borne the unprecedented weight of care work and social reproductive labour in their households. The more privileged sections of women have been able to delegate the burden to women from disadvantaged social locations. It defies the unrealistic societal standards of perfectly manicured hands of women who do the grunt work in their households. Rather, it tries to depict the realities behind performing social reproductive labour in the “private sphere”.

Visibilising Household Labour [February 9, 2025, Kolkata, West Bengal, India] 

This picture depicts the recent phenomenon of visibilising and monetising care work and social reproductive labour on social media. The kitchens are recorded as spaces of resistance wherein the labour that has been invisibilised for generations is made palatable for the public eye. This also helps women exercise their agency in the portrayal of the tedious invisibilised labour on social media. My work studies the consequences of this phenomenon. 

Justa Libertad para Decidir, Justa Libertad para Abortar
Street action to deliver 168 abortion letters to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court to demand the legalization of abortion. The Batuka Colectiva Wayunga Yachay, a drumming collective, accompanies the action, fueling chants and holding space through their presence.
 

Abortar No Es Delito 
Letters sharing abortion experiences hang on a clothesline, accompanied by the pañuelo verde (green scarf), a powerful symbol of the struggle for abortion rights across Latin America. In the background, blurred, stand police officers in front of the Court’s entrance.
 

Quito Feminista
March 8th protest in Quito. This photo was taken as the crowd sang “Canción Sin Miedo”, a song that speaks out against violence toward women and expresses the longing to live without fear. Visible in the image are handprint graffiti on the statue in the plaza and several protest posters with powerful messages.

_KanikkaSersia_Waitlisted
A handwritten sign on a tree in an affluent Bengaluru neighborhood captures the quiet tensions of class, where the city’s most precarious workers, its delivery riders, navigate not just traffic, but judgement.
 

_KanikkaSersia_Frustrated Engineers
In Bengaluru, the so-called Silicon Valley of India, this chai stall encapsulates the city’s tech culture, where software engineers, indispensable yet replaceable, toil for a technocapitalist system that profits from their labour without pause.
 

_KanikkaSersia_Can a Platform be Feminist?
On International Women’s Day, I was left speechless when a young software engineer smirked and asked, “Are you a feminist? Uh-oh!” At a platform company that proudly features women drivers in promotional videos and champions itself as a symbol of women’s empowerment, its own engineers hesitate to be labeled feminist. This disconnect between external branding and internal attitudes lays bare the unresolved gender dynamics within the tech spaces.

Delhi Hospital. © Robert D. Smith

‘The Delhi Hospital’ is a small, 50 bedded hospital in North Delhi. Unlike the majority of over 100 additional healthcare providers within a 500 meter radius of this hospital, it is government certified (‘sarkar duara manyata prapt’). Affixed within the same building is an independent, private pharmacy, also offering home delivery of medicines and blood tests. A man has left his bicycle and has gone inside for a speedy consultation. ‘The Delhi Hospital’ speaks to the enmeshed public, private nature of health in Delhi, its governmental lack and private sector surplus, the mundaneness of the commercialization of health and care, and the everydayness of seeking medicine. Aptly fitting into the arbitrariness of its own name, it is a hospital for Delhi that captures the essence of Delhi: a city that paradoxically hosts a plethora of hospitals yet has little healthcare available and staggeringly low health outcomes.

Rajnitik Dosti. © Robert D. Smith

Rajnitik Dosti – literally: political friendship – is a photo taken during a political rally for party workers in Delhi in the run up to India’s 2024 National Election. Two men sat calmly and contently as they listened to audience members give speeches to the party Ministers requesting that the party leader, Arvind Kejriwal, not resign from his position should he be arrested. It speaks to how electoral-politics is much more than the democratization of ideology, but is a space of social mobility, opportunity, sociality, and play.

The Local Doctor. © Robert D. Smith

The Local Doctor is a small clinic of an unlicensed healthcare practitioner. With nothing more than a blood pressure machine and decades of experience, the local doctor has medicine on demand. One medicine box will accommodate many patients, with tablets being broken and cut off into smaller strips. With government out of reach and out of sight, care becomes defined through the local doctors ability to provide symptomatic alleviation as opposed to any possibility of curation for underlying afflictions.
 

Bodies as Currency

Hundreds queue for transportation after clearing immigration at Singapore’s Woodlands checkpoint, forming patient lines that dissolve and reform throughout their journey. This 4-6 hour daily transit demands careful calibration of sleep, movement, and labor. Over 300,000 workers cross the Malaysia-Singapore border, withstanding crowded buses and motorcycle exhaust to leverage the economic differential combining Singaporean wages with Malaysian living costs. Their bodies become vessels of arbitrage, metabolizing time into currency, importing value across borders while leaving fragments of themselves on either side of the narrowing strait. © Zipei Wang

Final Malaysian Sight

Evening light catches thousands traversing the Johor-Singapore Causeway after checkpoint failure immobilized shuttle buses. Workers navigate this precarious infrastructure beneath the “Daulat Tuanku” (Long Live the King) banner, a royal proclamation from the Sultan who facilitated environmentally devastating land reclamation by Chinese developers despite constitutional prohibitions on monarchical commerce. Sovereign authority collaborates with transnational capital, extracting value from daily border friction while bodies absorb institutional failures and the scent of polluted water from the strait commodified as “sea view.” The causeway functions simultaneously as pathway and barrier, funneling aspirations through controlled channels where movement itself becomes commodity. © Zipei Wang

Carelessly Become Rich

A Chinese-style advertisement faces Singapore’s checkpoint across the strait, promising investors will “carelessly become rich after purchasing property” without accurate English translation. China-based developer R&F leads the surge in high-rise condominium construction marketed for proximity to Singapore. The word “carelessly,” intended to promise quick appreciation for investors, ironically foreshadows the reality behind luxury facades. As Mainland Chinese become absentee property owners, the area falls prey to unregulated intermediaries and deteriorating conditions, with mushroom-infested units becoming commonplace. This border area crystallizes into a perfect arbitrage architecture, embodying how capital extracts profit from spatial inequalities it simultaneously requires and claims to resolve. © Zipei Wang

The Subject: Cambodia’s Local Peacebuilders 

In the village chief’s house, six women gather before performing their stories of domestic violence through forum theatre. Their audience: neighbors, elders, local police, children, and vendors. Their script: lived experiences.

These women are Cambodia’s local peacebuilders – they use the language of art to break open what is too often kept behind closed doors. Through forum theatre, they shift silence into dialogue and create space for others to do the same.

Peace, here, is built from the ground up.

- Cambodia, 14.03.2025

The Method: Through the Camera’s Lens 

“No”, he says. “I want to play something happy.”

As a child, Arn Chorn-Pond played the flute to survive. He entertained the Khmer Rouge soldiers so they would not kill him. Years later, he returned to Cambodia to find other surviving artists and brought them together to revive what had been nearly erased during the genocide.

Through the camera’s lens, we begin to see and understand peace. It is not the absence of suffering, but the quiet, defiant choice to play something joyful instead.

This – words alone cannot hold. 

- Cambodia, 12.03.2025

The Process: Filmmaking as an Act of Peacebuilding 

Inside a temple we sit on the floor across from Venerable Vy Sovechea, a respected Buddhist monk. The camera is on. The sound rolls. I begin to ask questions. 

Buddhism was nearly wiped out during the Khmer Rouge regime. And yet, since the 1990s, a powerful, religiously rooted peace movement has reemerged across Cambodia. So how does religion contribute to peacebuilding today? I ask. He speaks. We listen with the intend to hear and understand. 

Filmmaking is more than a method. It is an act of peacebuilding. Because in this process, we do more than observe. We create space. We take part in what we seek to understand.

- Cambodia, 15.03.2025
 

Every Bit Counts. 
Bark of a Tree in the Tsar Simeon Garden Park, Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Thorn Up.
 Bark of a Tree from Lekki Conservation Centre, Lagos, Nigeria.

Interstices
Bark of a Tree in Vondelpark, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Beaulieu, Lausanne: an embodiment of the Swiss (welfare) state in transition.

Imagine these stairs, once alive with the effervescent joy of millions celebrating Switzerland's ascent. Today, the same steps echo with the more discrete rhythm of welfare program participants climbing towards the uncertain promises of the Halls de la Transition. What is H18? Somewhere to find a place to work? A workplace? What is a workplace today, and what is its absence? Can a citizen be without a workplace?

Dismantling to build anew.

Scholarly consensus identifies the 1980s as a period of fundamental philosophical change for the welfare state. It transitioned from primarily functioning as an insurer, safeguarding citizens against life's risks, to being conceived as an investor tasked with activating the latent labor potential of its populace. This shift coincided with the declining popularity of the Comptoir Suisse, a once vibrant expression of national effervescence. As my informants actively work to cultivate a Swiss iteration of entrepreneurial citizenship (as theorized by Lilly Irani), utilizing their entrepreneurial hub as a tangible vision of a post-labor future, we must ask: what societal structures and understandings are being dismantled in this process?

Welcome to Laus’Angeles

In his approximately fifty-thousand-word book, sociologist Anthony Galluzzo argues that Silicon Valley Imaginaries profoundly permeate our thinking. Yet, perhaps an image – even a fleeting one, such as this promptly erased tag that once faced H18 – is worth a thousand words. But does even this image resonate as deeply as a local rap might?

Lausanne capitale olympique
Capital du style
On devrait être celle du pays
Wallah que c’est nous l’industrie 
On les baiserait tous si on était-unis
Ya trop de talent dans ma ville
Que des numéros uno

Kingzer, New Résolution (Freestyle)

We are all welfare numéros in a formally united state.

Urban pilgrimage
The colorful graffiti walkway in Comuna 13. Once one of Medellín’s most violent neighbourhoods, Comuna 13 now draws over 1.5 million visitors each year. 
 

Youth and the city
Latin American cities pulse with life, but for young people growing up in the margins, they can feel like some of the loneliest places on earth.
 

The crossing
In Medellín’s bustling city centre, even crossing a walkway demands attitude. You need to move like a badass to make it through.