Marco Frauchiger and Sebastian Stadler have been selected by Centre de la photographie Genève (CPG) for their projects researching, and experimenting with, the significations and significance of photography, two nominations that resonate with the bicentennial of photography celebrated in 2026–2027. Through complex and layered processes, their respective work explores, questions, challenges and pushes to their limits, equally visually and conceptually, the ways in which we rely on photography to make sense of the world, of history, and of our place within the world.

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While Marco Frauchiger and Sebastian Stadler have been exhibited internationally in recent years, CPG aims with their nomination to FUTURES to bring an increased visibility to their work at the international level, and hopes that new opportunities to develop and circulate their work will arise from their integration in the network.

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Marco Frauchiger presents The War Movie, an imageless video listing all wars that happened since the industrialisation of warfare and up to October 2025, and Camera Obscura Type III, for which he built a large format camera from aircraft debris collected in Laos, which he then used to photograph crash sites in Laos from the Secret War (1964–1973) as well as the Swiss industrial sites where the aircraft had been produced.

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Sebastian Stadler presents New Archeologies, a series exploring our desire for control and clarity and echoing how photography has been harnessed to observe and measure the world, through double exposure where AI-generated charts, scales and grids are superimposed on negative images of nature and human forms.

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Mahalia taje Giotto presents their most recent project, existential boner, a personal work about obsessions related to the body, identity and sexuality, which was published as a book by SPBH and ECAL in July 2023, and is also an installation. Mahalia taje Giotto is and has always been a trans person; they chose to identify as non-binary and started their gender-affirming hormone therapy in November 2020. They closely and compulsively monitored the changes they were undergoing, as a way of reappropriation of their own self. Doing so, photography was for taje the best way to record all of these steps, following the never-ending rhythm of their obsessive thoughts. Through a compilation of images and texts, including collages, graffiti, vernacular photography, studio shoots, snapshots, and scans, taje’s body of work evolved in parallel with their own body, developing in a direction that emphasised the urgent feelings crawling through their mind, ultimately telling a singular story that brings representation to many – representation that was lacking in their childhood.

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Zoé Elia Menthonnex presents three recent projects: THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN, NON-SENSE PROJECT and ZOMBIE. THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN is described by the artists as a dream woven at the crossroads of worlds, absurd poetry, a dreamlike journey through the chimerical limbo of the subconscious. This visual narrative, both phantasmagorical and formal, juxtaposes dark and disturbing imagery, reflecting the artist’s obsession with this other world. It oscillates between lucidity and hallucination, between light and darkness, like an inner wandering where landmarks gradually dissolve. NON-SENSE PROJECT is a multifaceted exploration of the quest for meaning, developed during the covid crisis. At a time when uncertainty was omnipresent and her own identity was being called into question, this work became a means of taming this instability. The experimental project ZOMBIE brings together a collection of images taken from scans of flowers and other organic objects gleaned from the artist’s wanderings. Each element is selected for its fragility, its state of transition between the ephemeral and the perennial, like a vestige of nature in mutation. Thanks to the method used – transparency, inversion of colours and transformation of textures – these fragments of reality become something else. The flower undergoes a metamorphosis, losing its original status to give birth to a new entity, a hybrid creature that is both foreign and familiar.

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The artists has been nominated by Danaé Panchaud, Director of Centre de la photographie Genève.