Every other year, the Festival des Arts Visuels, which is devoted to photography and held in Vevey, Switzerland, selects an artist to receive $42,000 to fund a new project. As a member of the festival's jury last week, I helped review the work of 750 photographers from 63 countries. The winner was Augustin Rebetez, a young Swiss whose photos, videos and drawings can be frightening yet weirdly playful and touching. Awkward home scenes, with walls that come to life and beds that breathe, are filled with demented twists and creepy characters. The fairytale world of his videos is as unsettling as the early work of David Lynch and the claymation art of Nathalie Djurberg — but also tender in the way that Tim Burton's work can be.
Rebetez likes to work in Norway in the winter because of the long, dark days there. The video "The Dinner of the Lonely Man" was made in an empty house in the country's north that he has returned to several times over the years. He had been told that the owner of the house, whom he never met but who can be seen in the video's painting, lived by himself and was very lonely. That loneliness inspired the video's love story.
This morning I spoke with Rebetez about his work over the phone — he was in Lagos, Nigeria, to premiere a film, "Cowboy Noir," that he shot with collective he belongs to. "I always work at night," he told me. "I never take pictures during the day. If I have to work during the day, I will close the curtains and make it black. If you go to the theater, it won't be a white cube like in a gallery. It will be a black cube. Night has a power. I often use a flashlight. I always use my light."
Rebetez often works in abandoned spaces that happen to be rich with objects he can use in his videos and photographs. The phones below, for example, came from an old cupboard in an abandoned graphite mine in Norway. "They were like a treasure for me," he said, "these old phones, not able to communicate anymore." So he tried to make something "like a labyrinth, like a maze" out of them.
This picture is an example of Rebetez's recurring interest in dreams and home.
And these roller skates show how the objects in his photos often take on human characteristics.
"I am not able to take something as it exists," Rebetez said of his work. "I have to find a way to change something. When I draw people I do them with three hands or with the leg behind the head." That's why he plans to use his grant money to photograph circus performers. "I would like to bring acrobats into my work because they are people who can do things with their bodies that other people can't. I need people who can do some crazy things with their bodies. I will make crazy pictures. "
Here is an excerpt from a more recent video by Rebetez, called "Maison":
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