Switzerland sweet Switzerland
Exhibited during the exhibition «The pastry show» at Dagnino in à Rome.
18.11.25-23.11.25

In this exhibition I am showing a series of three plates made of chocolate. This type of plates were produced in ceramic during the 18th century for bourgeois and aristocratic families, and include a trompe-l’oeil representation of wood and an engraving with a landscape, which I chose to replace with images of swiss glaciers.

The combination of the wood that suggests a homely atmosphere, the images of glaciers, as well as the fact that they are made out of chocolate – for the production of which Switzerland became famous – results in a very stereotyped representation of “Swissness”.  But this sweet reminds us above all of our bitter colonial past in which Switzerland has participated, even though it has gone through great lenghts to hide it. The swiss companies that invented the very popular milk chocolate chose to publicise the origins of their milk – showing the swiss alpine life, mountains and cows – instead of mentioning the origins or working conditions of the main ingredient of their product. This marketing worked very well, since today the average swiss person eats about 11 kilos of chocolate per year. Given that Cocoa beans do not grow in Switzerland, the ecological toll of this industry is not negligible and contributes greatly to global warming.

I chose to work with chocolate because of its organicity: I liked the idea that this idealistic representation of switzerland will decompose and eventually disappear. It also resonates with the undergoing changes of the landscapes and alpine life that these companies used in their marketing, since they are menaced in their existence by global warming.

Man isst was man isst
Film made in 2025 thanks to a research grant awarded by the Geneva Cultural Service

After “Flunked”, I wanted to make a less narrative animated film and work on the relationship between matter and animation in order to offer a reflection on stop-motion. I wanted to explore what fascinates me about this medium: animating the inanimate, bringing it to life. To play with this ambiguity, I animated perishable, organic materials, which allowed me to highlight their decomposition process. The result is a composition reminiscent of a classic still life. After a short while, the song “Life Is Life,” taken from a video of Diego Maradona training – with the sound of the crowd still audible – begins to play, and a character made of organic, edible materials gets up and starts dancing. It dances and dances, and as they do so, we can observe the different elements rotting and falling apart, and see the change that time has wrought on the character.

This film allowed me to continue my practice of sculpture and installation in a different way, where I like to work with fragile materials and put them to the test with techniques and crafts that I repurpose in a “DIY” way. The temporal dimension is important here: the animated elements become a kind of clock bearing witness to the filming time, where two weeks are reduced to three minutes.

Link: https://youtu.be/1PsF5yV5RC8