The War Movie

‘This project investigates Switzerland’s entanglement in global conflict, questioning the narrative of neutrality as political and temporal distance. During the Cold War, Swiss-manufactured aircraft, the Pilatus PC-6 Porter, were used by CIA-operated airlines in the Secret War in Laos, a country officially recognised as neutral under the Geneva Convention. While Switzerland did not declare war, its industry profited from geopolitical struggle shaped by anti-communist ideology and economic interest. In Laos, I encountered a local practice of transforming war debris into everyday tools. This gesture of reuse became the starting point of my work. Adopting this practice, I began constructing functional cameras from aircraft wreckage and related materials found in Laos. Over six years of field research and archival investigation, I collected fragments, documents, images, found footage and war debris connected to these aircraft. From this material, I built a large-format camera obscura. With it, I photographed crash sites and scarred landscapes in Laos before returning the camera to Switzerland to photograph its industrial place of origin. Central to the project is the gesture: searching, assembling, returning, and photographing its place of production. The camera becomes a speculative apparatus that re-enters the archive and activates what cannot be fully recorded. The provenance of some fragments cannot be completely verified – reflecting the fractured nature of war archives and the instability of historical traceability. The work unfolds as an incomplete archive, where objects, images, found footage, documents, newspaper articles and gesture form a circular movement between production and destruction, past and present.’ https://vimeo.com/1034559140