| | | | | | | | Swiss Border, Chiasso, 2016
from the series "How to Secure a Country"
© Salvatore Vitale | | | | | | How to Secure a Country | | | | 23 February – 26 May, 2019 | | | | Opening: Friday, 22 February, 6pm | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Police dog, Zurich, 2016
from the series "How to Secure a Country"
© Salvatore Vitale | | | | | | Switzerland is well-known as one of the safest countries on earth and as a prime example of efficiency and efficacy. But how do state and private actors ensure this valuable commodity, which is as much a basic need as it is a billion-dollar business? And how much freedom are we as citizens willing to give up for our security? Between 2014 and 2018, Salvatore Vitale (born 1986 in Palermo, lives in Lugano and Zurich) set out on a visual research project, to discover the central underlying tenets for such a country to evolve, exist and endure. One of the central conditions he made out is the development of a culture based on securing, protecting, insuring and preventing, which is supported by the presence and production of national security.
In order to do this, Vitale investigated the social and technological mechanisms underlying this preventive and defensive shield and takes a close look at the various institutional protagonists involved — police, military, customs and migration authorities, weather services, IT companies, and research institutions for robotics and artificial intelligence.
It positions itself as a contemporaneous artistic contribution to debates in a society that is confronted with growing threats — real or perceived — from terrorism and cybercrime, surveillance and data misuse. It also inscribes itself into current Swiss political debates on Swiss arms exports and citizen privacy. | | | | | | | | | Swiss Border, Chiasso, 2015
from the series "How to Secure a Country"
© Salvatore Vitale | | | | | | The project explores visually the ways in which social, political and psychological phenomena, which are most of the time invisible and somewhat elusive, become stabilized and therefore also visible through standard operating procedures and protocols. By tracing networks connecting the activities of data storage and insurance companies, weather forecasting services as well as the police, the military, or state-run organizations related to customs and migration, it traces and visually maps what could be referred to as a Swiss public-private security complex. Vitale’s goal was to capitalize on the actual fluidity and abstractness of the country’s security measures and to photographically re-appropriate and re-code the "matter-of-factness" of the instruction manuals and protocols found in bureaucratic procedures. In this way, its paradoxical nature becomes apparent by looking at how "clear-cut" solutions are applied to what are, in fact, often highly fleeting phenomena. It means to trace and render visible the complexities that lie behind the Swiss security industries by providing a view from the inside thanks to an active collaboration with its actors and institutions.
In "How to Secure a Country" Vitale and his collaborators reflect and visualize the production of security (and therefore also insecurity) in photographs, texts, and data visualizations. The result aims at grasping the wider contexts and the functioning of an exemplary contemporary society that is in many ways emblematic of social, political and economic vectors and trends globally. Seen in this perspective Switzerland is part of globalization processes — as a localized node and point of culmination of many globalized flows and movements, but not based on a theory of historical exceptionalism. | | | | | | | | | Protocol, Bern, 2016
from the series "How to Secure a Country"
© Salvatore Vitale | | | | | | The installation of the exhibition goes far beyond "just" presenting photographic works on walls. Instead, it uses the open-plan space of the Fotostiftung Schweiz in order to generate a complex informational environment to be experienced with multiple senses by the visitors, as they manoeuvre a flexible itinerary activating the above components in different configurations and media. As alluded to above, multiple registers and layers of other visual material will make up important parts of the exhibition’s display strategy. The exhibition, then, is organized to be experienced as a forest of signs, an urban landscape of photographic images, a selective "grand tour" of the Swiss security system, which as we will argue in this book could be seen as the epitome of national and transnational securitization strategies globally.
The work focuses on some of the pressing and relevant socio-political, aesthetic and technological issues of our time. It was conceived as a think-tank or aggregator for the structuring of the complex field of the Swiss security complex, addressing various levels of popular culture, politics of representation and current societal discussions of security, privacy and risk management, and technology.
Fotostiftung Schweiz presents the first comprehensive exhibition of this body of work. | | | | | | | | | Swiss border, Ponte Tresa, 2015
from the series "How to Secure a Country"
© Salvatore Vitale | | | | | | Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based visual artist and editor. Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK). He was a recipient of the Swiss Arts Council grant in 2015-2016, the PHmuseum Award Grant in 2017, the Swiss Design Awards, FOAM Talent and Punctum Award in 2018. His work has been shown in museums and at photo festivals including the Photoforum Pasquart Biel/Bienne, OCAT Shanghai and Shenzhen, MOCAK – Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Hamburg Triennale of Photography, T3 Photo Festival Tokyo, and Jaipur International Photography Festival. He teaches at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and he has led workshops worldwide. Vitale is also the cofounder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, a Swiss-based international photo-graphy magazine that focuses on the evolution of photography practice within the contemporary art field.
Lars Müller Publishers is publishing the book: "How to Secure a Country. From Border Policing via Weather Forecast to Social Engineering — a Visual Study of 21st Century Statehood". Edited by Salvatore Vitale and Lars Willumeit. Incollaboration with Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur. With essays by Roland Bleiker, Jonas Hagmann, Philip Di Salvo, and Lars Willumeit. English language. Design: Offshore Studio. 296 pages, 192 illustrations, hardcover. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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