Sabotage by Salvatore Vitale at Photo Elysée

SABOTAGE brings together Death by GPS, a long-term project by Salvatore Vitale, presented in its entirety for the first time.

Overview

Developed between 2022 and 2025, the project emerged from extended research and production in South Africa, where Vitale spent time with platform freelancers in Johannesburg and with Zama zamas working in abandoned mine shafts.

These encounters revealed how deeply contemporary digital systems depend on labour that is distributed, precarious, and often rendered invisible. Death by GPS focuses on the people who sustain these systems and on the pressures, compromises, and moments of refusal that shape their everyday lives under digital capitalism.

Working across film, photography, multi-channel video installations, found footage, textiles, and text, Vitale uses the notion of sabotage as a metaphor for resistance. Rather than overt disruption, the work attends to subtle gestures such as hesitation, withdrawal, endurance, and refusal, forms of agency that emerge within systems governed by surveillance, ranking, and algorithmic control.

SABOTAGE unfolds as a spatial journey, moving from a polished, corporate-style entrance through fragmented and intimate workspaces, and culminating in a landscape of electronic waste. This progression mirrors the lifecycle of digital labour, from promise and productivity to exhaustion and disposal.

Across its different forms, SABOTAGE asks how human presence persists within increasingly automated systems, and what it means to remain visible, present, and human within infrastructures designed to normalise exploitation.

About The Artist

Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations.

Vitale is the Artistic Director of FUTURES Photography and former Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, both international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography. He also serves as a Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he leads the Transmedia Storytelling Programme. Previously, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, an international photography publication.

Vitale’s work has received international awards. It is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.