American Code

American Code explores landscapes shaped by the diffusion of the American myth. Through large-format photography, I observe how symbols, signs, and stereotypes silently transform places, revealing new cultural codes and evolving identities.

From a young age, the imagery of postwar American culture has fascinated me. As a Swiss photographer whose grandfather, more than a century earlier, had left for America pursuing the dream of a new life, the echo of the “American myth,” experienced reflexively within my family circle, seems to have influenced my education and, at the same time, sparked in me a deep interest in observing landscape, architecture, people, and their ways of life.

Through my work, I propose an open reading of different places that suggest unprecedented visual codes, assimilated into a predominantly autobiographical dimension. Interpreted through the eloquent language of large-format photography, using an 8x10 view camera, my images propose imaginaries of the contemporary world assimilated into autonomous universes, corresponding to cultural forms in the making.

My photographs primarily focus on fragments of landscapes destined to establish themselves as evocations of a transposed America, on iconic details that are increasingly widespread and testify to a deep desire to belong to a mass culture ready to radicalize itself in other contexts. Forms, objects, and symbols recalling the American myth—enunciating extravagant and alienating collective imaginaries—become a clear demonstration of the evolving identity of places.Within territories predominantly characterized by a vernacular tradition that has historically managed its transformations internally, signs of “cultural invasion” appear as predetermined individualities, re-signifying the landscape. Beginning with the large signs that dot streets and cities, re-propositions of forms evocative of an America that is distant yet familiar permeate both public and private space. Symbols drawn from a universe of common brands and stereotypes multiply, tacitly altering our perceptions and, unknowingly, even our habits.

Hailed as emblems of progress in the making, in the name of a democratic freedom exported across the ocean, the hallmarks of the American dream affect our lives by crossing geographical and cultural boundaries, contaminating and modifying them.Evoking the experience of New Topographics, the sequence of images selected in American Code seeks to encourage a more attentive gaze toward the landscapes we cross indifferently every day, in an attempt to exorcise the intellectual and cultural dependence of which we are often unaware.

If it is true that in different historical periods each culture produces new eyes with which to look at the world, then in an almost entirely globalized present, we must strive to decode the landscapes of which we are a part.