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, editor and educator. In his multi-layered artistic practice and research, Vitale’s work focuses on the development and complexity of modernsocieties exploring power structures, political cosmologies and technological mediation, whilst using expanded documentary analysis, including elements of fiction, speculative storytelling and the use of multiple visual forms. His work has been awarded internationally, including the Phmuseum Award (2017), the Foam Talent (2018), the Punctum Award (2018), the Pro Helvetia Shanghai Research Grant (2019-2020), the Bally Award (2021), the MAST Photo Grant, (2022), the Swiss Design Awards (2018 and 2023), and it has been exhibited widely in museums and at photo festivals.Vitale is a Senior Lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He has led workshops worldwide and is a visiting lecturer at several European universities. He is also the Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and FUTURES European Photography Platform and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine.He has contributed to and edited several publications, including HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narratives and RESET: Questioning The Image, The Market and The Role of Representation (Futures Photography, 2020 and 2021) and NUMMER: Post-Photography (HSLU Lucerne, 2021).