Joshua Rigo

“On a réclamé des bras, et des hommes sont arrivés.” 
 “We asked for hands, and men arrived.” 
 - Max Frisch 

This June, Switzerland rejected a proposal to cap its population at 10 million, an initiative aimed at limiting immigration. Yet the issue reaches back to the 1950s, when the country’s expanding industries introduced a high demand for migrant workers. At the age I am now, my grandparents left northern Italy for Switzerland. They met there and eventually settled in Geneva, where I was born and raised. Although the country’s infrastructure was built by people like them, I hold a Livret pour étrangers (“Permit for strangers”).

Starting from my family archive, I gather snippets of my grandparents’ home, their clothes, their hands, and fragments that are anchored in my childhood memory. Through the macro lens, I find the photographs layered with traces: Scratches, dust and fingerprints - my ancestors? The skin of the skin. Are we a touch away? I think about all the hands that have been in between these images to arrive in mine. I remember the calloused and rugged skin of my grandfather’s hands - he was a tiler. Mine are all dainty in comparison. His rusty and weathered tools are material records of his hands and his labor. I am fascinated by this recurring tactility, in that spirit I make contact prints and photograms, where touching is a means for remembering, connecting, and belonging. 

Within the space, an archival image is presented on a grid of ceramic tiles coated with liquid emulsion and exposed in the darkroom, while lumen prints hold traces of my grandfather’s weathered tiling tools. Paper prints have been processed with a plant-based developer made from leaves foraged in his native region, bringing the matter of the landscape into the photographic object.