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The

Artist

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Photographer

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Visual Artist

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Researcher

Santiago Martinez Benedetti

Nominated in
2026
By
Photo Elysée
Lives and Works in
Lausanne
I was born in Cali, Colombia, and moved to Switzerland at the age of four. My early interest in photography emerged through BMX culture, shaped by a raw, spontaneous, and DIY mindset. This curiosity led me to study photography at ECAL, in Lausanne where I got a Bachelor in Photography in 2020. Since then, I have worked across different fields of photography, balancing applied practice with the development of a personal artistic body of work. In 2024, following a residency as part of the Verzasca Foto Festival, I initiated the project Torbola 31, which marked a turning point in my artistic practice. The project combines the DIY, instinctive heritage of my beginnings with a more structured and conceptual approach. It was awarded the Swiss Design Awards in 2025. Alongside my artistic work, I founded Siestaaa Papers, my own publishing house dedicated to collaborations with other artists and designers.
Projects
2026

Torbola 31

Torbola 31 is part of an applied research project exploring a new hybrid process between photocopying and photography. By combining a large-format lens and mirrors with a laser printer, I transform what is usually a reproduction machine into an image-making tool, with its own particularities and limitations. Each image is printed directly onto A4 paper, bypassing any digital interface, much like a Polaroid. As a photographer born during the rise of the digital technology, reconnecting with a physical and sensory approach to photography feels essential. For this project, I carried my equipment on a trailer attached to a bicycle, pedaling up and down the Verzasca Valley in Switzerland. This performative approach pays homage to early mountain photographers who carried heavy wet-plate cameras to capture the peaks. With Torbola 31, I aim to explore a new understanding of the sublime grounded in a playful, raw and tactile approach. Abstraction becomes a form of resistance to the traditional, romantizised vision of alpine landscapes. The technical restrictions of shooting with a printer become creatives opportunities. Thus, the movement of the scanner replaces the shutter of the camera, I can reprint over the same sheet with altered setting, and I can also play with scale by placing object (such a little stones found on the path) on the scanner glass to intervene directly in the image. The resulting images defy expectations and invite a playful reimagining of the Verzasca valley.
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Santiago Martinez Benedetti
was nominated by
Photo Elysée
in
2026
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

Both articulate practices in which the image functions as a contested site: a field of tension between memory and erasure, between private and shared narratives, between material density and perceptual surface.

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Johanna Hullár’s work departs from perceptual slippage—the cognitive impulse to recognize forms within forms—and unfolds as an inquiry into how images produce meaning through projection and association. She stages encounters between still and moving images, activating zones where the real and the speculative interpenetrate. Objects, synthetic materials, and organic matter coexist within installations that speculate on possible futures and on the entanglement of human-made and natural agencies. Inflected by a subtly humorous and distinctly feminine perspective, her installations construct immersive environments in which sculptural arrangements encased in ice remain in a state of suspended transformation. Melting becomes both process and metaphor: a choreography of appearance and disappearance that foregrounds impermanence as a material condition.
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Santiago Martinez, by contrast, interrogates the apparatus itself. Working at the limits of DIY lens-based devices, he develops photographic systems that displace conventional hierarchies between reproduction and production. His recent projects operate through a hybrid protocol combining large-format optics, mirrors, and a laser printer, effectively reprogramming a machine of duplication into an image-generating device. The resulting works foreground the frictions, distortions, and temporalities embedded within the apparatus. As a photographer formed in the wake of digital dematerialization, Martinez reclaims the mechanical and the tactile as critical positions, insisting on photography’s haptic and processual dimensions.

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Across their distinct methodologies, Hullár and Martinez mobilize abstraction and the sublime not as aesthetic categories, but as operative strategies—modes of resistance within a culture structured by acceleration and obsolescence. Through processes of metamorphosis, material instability, and technical détournement, they re-situate photography as an expanded field: a space where image-making becomes an embodied negotiation with matter, time, and perception.

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In addition to their participation in FUTURES in 2026, both artists have been selected by Photo Elysée for a residency at the Fondation Fiminco in Paris, culminating in an exhibition in fall 2026.

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The members of the jury:

Nathalie Herschdorfer - Director at Photo Elysée
Manuel Sigrist - Curator, Head of exhibitions and programmes at Photo Elysée
Hannah Pröbsting - Curator, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Sarah Bourget - Scientific Collaborator, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Julie Dayer - Exhibition manager, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Lydia Dorner - Exhibition manager, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée

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