Latifa Echakhch studied at the art academies of Grenoble, Paris-Cergy, and Lyon. Now based in Switzerland, Eckakhch is concerned with the concept of culture as well as personal and collective memory in between the poles of social and political debate. Her work often features installations that make use of a wide variety of materials, such as brick and raw earth, which she mixes with ink. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

Swiss artist Silvie Defraoui, born in 1935, is a pioneer of video art and art education in Switzerland. Beginning in 1975, she worked in collaboration with her husband Chérif Defraoui (1932–1994). Together they developed the Archives du Futur, a reflection on images, their status, and potential for memory and the future. The two artists also founded the legendary Atelier Médias Mixtes at Geneva’s École supérieure des Beaux-Arts (now HEAD—Genève). Since 1995, Defraoui has pursued a practice using various forms of expression, including projection, installation, ceramics, and serigraphy. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

Isabelle Cornaro, based in Paris and Geneva, holds degrees in art history and visual arts. She has a strong interest in experimental cinema and devotes herself to the narrative, symbolic, and economic origins of things. In her work she assumes an anthropologist-type manner to investigate people's seemingly fixated attachment to emotionally charged, even fetishised objects, creating large stage installations and short movies. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

Swiss photographer Rene Burri (1933-2014) has been wherever history had been played out. A member of the famous Magnum Photos cooperative since 1955, he photographed in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, recording the Six-Days and Yom Kippur Wars, as well as the Vietnam War during the 1960s. His many travels took him to Japan and China, across Europe and the Americas to report sharply many of the 20th century's major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities helped him create portraits of celebrities such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragan; or artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely. His iconic picture of Che Guevara with cigar, shot in 1963, is one of the world's most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits ever. Burri had a close relationship with Lausanne's Musee de l' Elysee and in 1987 the museum staged a first exhibition of his work, entitled The Ruins of the Future, followed by his first major retrospective in 2004. The museum also hosts the Fondation Rene Burri, which the artist established in 2013 as a home for his estate. Published to coincide with a new exhibition at Musee de l'Elysee in spring 2020, Rene Burri: An Eye Explosion draws from this vast collection. It brings together for the first time Burri's entire body of work, photographic and non-photographic. Black-and-white and colour photographs feature alongside previously unpublished archival documents as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolours, and other multiple objects he collected. It offers a new, multi-faceted and uniquely intimate view of one of the world's greatest photo reporters.

Alain Huck, born 1957, lives and works in francophone Switzerland. Following his degree in Fine Arts at the Ecole cantonale des beaux-arts Lausanne (ECAL) he became a founding member of the M/2 artists collective in Vevey in 1987, with whom he worked for four years. He has been working on his own since 1990, creating a body of polymorphous works in a variety of media: painting, photography, drawing, video, often using text as well. In 2006 Huck started to work on an extensive series of very large-scale charcoal drawings, titled Salons noirs. This corpus now comprises nearly 80 compositions, in which the artist has superimposed different images, combined and confused within a mobile, blurred vision that is occasionally reiterated. This new book for the first time presents the entire series, completed by a selection of other recent works by Alain Huck. Julie Enckell Julliard's essay examines the 'Salons noirs' and suggests ways of approaching them, and also refers to the various relations of Huck's work to that of other artists, such as Albrecht Durer, Arnold Bocklin, Robert Longo, or Gerhard Richter.