Maud Fässler

Born in 1980 in Zürich, Switzerland, she lives and works there.

In 2006, having graduated from the ECAL, the fertile Lausanne art school, this young Swiss photographer, Maud Fässler, started to come to notice through the hardness and impact of the subjects she chooses to confront in a dispassionate and pathos-free way: autopsies of corpses, dissections, the excised sexual organs of African women. 

What photographic series will you be showing at le Printemps de septembre?

Christian Bernard has decided to show a series which he's the only person to have seen for the time being, Autopsy . I'd put it away in the bottom drawer because it had been very difficult to produce. The sight and smell of death... You have to be able to completely detach yourself from that emotion in order to photograph. It's a series of 21 pictures taken in 2006 using the 6/7 format, at the University Hospital in Lausanne, in the pathology department. This was not where they carried out police autopsies, looking for causes of death, but a medical research sector, where you find information about a disease in the body. When I was a child, my parents explained to me that they had given the body of my dead brother to science. I wanted to know what that meant. Since then, I've been asking myself about the life of the body after death, as well as about the decision that I will take in relation to my own death.

What does the dictum “Wherever I am going, I am already there” do for you?

In our present-day society, you always have to be projecting yourself, moving forward, looking towards the future, and, mentally, you are already there. We are no longer aware of the present. But wherever the mind is, everything is. With regard to my photos, another meaning comes to the fore: it doesn't matter where you go, in the end we all end up the same.

What does art enable you to do?

Photography, rather than art, because I don't express myself through other media, enables me to go and see what I would like to know about.