5. Fotofestival Lenzburg 2022

The Fotofestival 2022 will once again bring the world of photography to Lenzburg and Aarau for an entire month and expand its horizons with new exhibition venues, international partnerships and world-famous authors.
The past three years have presented us with enormous challenges and clearly demonstrated how our resources are distributed. Some of us have been deprived of our livelihood, others have been on the verge of losing it, and some have realized how privileged they are. However, we all have one thing in common - we are thankful that the situation has recovered, and we are no longer so limited. We have the opportunity to meet with people again, to be out and explore the world - perhaps more consciously and using our resources more sparingly and considerately.
As already in 2021, the photo festival will explore the theme of resources and develop an artistic approach that seeks to capture moments of world events. The twelve exhibitions and the planned events of the 5th Fotofestival Lenzburg have been chosen in such a way that a constructive dialogue can develop between the exhibitions themselves, but also between image producers and users, i.e. bringing together contemporary positions of Swiss and international authors with their audience on the topic of resources.

For the 2022 edition, the focus is on the relationship between humans and nature, and their interplay in relation to our health, quality of life and sustainability, as well as the major climatic and societal changes we are currently experiencing.
Thanks to contributions from sponsors and partners who support the festival, each year we manage to offer a stage to international but also lesser-known photographers. We aim to engage a wider audience and we have established joint projects with more than twenty museums and partners. Additionally, we are inviting experts from abroad, such as Whitney Johnson, the Vice President of Visual and Immersive Content at National Geographic and Elisa Medde, Director of Foam Magazine.
A fundamental goal of the festival is that the project is not only dedicated to the topic, but also acts in the spirit of a responsible and sustainable way of using resources. In the development of all exhibitions, emphasis is placed on the use of recyclable and environmentally friendly materials. From production to presentation, all of the exhibitions are reusable and created resource friendly. In this edition, works and installation materials already produced will be reused or repurposed. The use of plastic materials is kept to a minimum. Festival bags are currently being made from the flags and lanyards of past editions and other textiles for production trials. Special attention is also paid to the usage of local resources in the development of the events, give precedence to local food and beverage producers and using public and electric transport (thanks to the collaboration with Swiss E- Car and SBB).
Another novelty of the festival is its expansion into the digital world: the exhibition "Wata Na Life" by Ngadi Smart will be accompanied by an augmented reality experience so that visitors can discover the festival directly on their cell phones; for the first time, two workshops on NFT and its possibilities within photography, with expert Sonja Lackner, will be conducted entirely online. The festival website has been enriched with many insights, including a blog that gives space to the authors themselves to present themselves.

Exhibitions
At the venue Stapferhaus in Lenzburg, we are showing for the first time the work SINOMOCENE (2014 - ongoing) by Zurich-based Italian artist Davide Monteleone. The long- term work explores China's immense efforts to reshape the global movement of goods, services and capital through an infrastructure initiative called Belt and Road, or better known as the New Silk Road, shifting the geopolitical balance towards the East. There is some disconnect between the economic and geopolitical processes at work here and the way they manifest themselves in the world. While large infrastructure projects such as river dams, container ports, and rail networks can certainly be seen from Earth orbit, other changes find little to no visual expression in the landscape, such as the generation, dissemination, and collection of data, knowledge, patents, information, and especially capital, as well as the long- term impacts on the environment, resources and climate. The publication of the same name will be released and presented at the photo festival.
In the Villa of the Müllerhaus we present four different artistic positions, including VENUSES (2018-2020) by Laurence Rasti (Lausanne). In 2018, Laurence Rasti asked two of her friends - Shaya, an Iranian trans woman she met in Turkey, and Lena, her neighbor in Geneva - to become protagonists of a long-term project. The goal was to explore the depths of gender identity, especially femininity, for which she combined images with texts in the form of interviews. In the course of the project, Lena learned that she had breast cancer. What had begun with a seemingly basic premise of what is a woman suddenly became much more complex, challenging, and painful as both protagonists struggled with their bodies to reflect on who they felt they were.

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An excerpt of the long-term project NEW ARTIFICALITY (2015 - ongoing) by Catherine Leutenegger (Geneva) will be on view at Lenzburg Castle. Since beginning her research work on the emergence of 3D printing, Catherine Leutenegger has been able to observe and document the rapid development of this technology and its wide range of potential applications, which could fundamentally change a number of industries, from construction to medical technology. It is not yet clear whether these innovations in digital technologies will be able to provide sustainable and much-needed solutions to the current challenges facing humanity and our planet.
LUNAX is a collectively organized, Zurich-based and since 2016 existing Swiss Photography agency with currently 15 members. Since spring 2021, Severin Bigler, Sabina Bobst, Annette Boutellier, Daniel Desborough, Raisa Durandi, Patrick Hürlimann, Benjamin Manser, Caroline Minjolle, Marion Nitsch, Katja Schmidlin, Fridolin Walcher, Dominic Wenger and Marco Zanoni have been working on a large-scale joint project on the topic of climate change. Under the title "And now? - LUNAX in Climate Change”, they bring together different photographic positions on topics such as ecological living, biodiversity, sustainable fashion, glacier ablation, our close relationship to nature, CO2 emissions, globalized consumption, flying, city trees and plastic, and present them in an exhibition with the same title at the Stadtmuseum Aarau.
DES GLETSCHERS KERN by Fridolin Walcher (Canton Glarus) is conceived as an open-air installation in the form of large canvases in the public space of Lenzburg and shows a selection of impressive images that the artist has photographed in Greenland and Switzerland and that address climate change and glacier ablation in a forceful way.

In its open call, the photo festival reached out to the international community of image- makers to submit photographic projects on the theme of resources. The response was overwhelming and global. A distinguished jury selected four projects to exhibit at the upcoming festival edition at Müllerhaus and Schloss Lenzburg. These include Sandrine Elberg (France) and her project “Jökull”, the photographic work “Die Solitären” by Ingar Krauss (Germany), Antonio Perez (Spain) and his series of diptychs “The Sea Moves, the Sea Moves” and Ngadi Smart (United Kingdom and Sierra Leone) with the artistic work “Wata Na Life” (Water is Life). Ngadi Smart receives the jury prize of 1500 Swiss francs.
This year, the popular exhibition in the shop windows of the Old Town is back. 65 photographers will be exhibiting their pictures in the shop displays and shop windows of the town.
In cooperation with SONY and the World Photography Organization, the Fotofestival Lenzburg presents a curated selection of 50 images of the best positions of the Sony World Photography Awards on the theme of resources in public spaces.
Dutch artist Henri Blommers was invited to be our guest as the first FFL Artist in Residence, in cooperation with Müllerhaus Lenzburg. During three weeks in December 2021, he spent much of his time in the forests and meadows in and around Lenzburg, photographing the local flora, and taking various samples. Of particular interest to him are those intersections in nature where these become managed natural resources and where native plant species and their diversity are often endangered. In addition to his own intensive research, he also sought advice and help from the locals. His analog photographic creative process is physically, photochemically, and conceptually shaped by the observations he makes in the field, as well as from a deep sense of urgency for our environment.

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