Dominique Teufen
My Travels Through The World On My Copy Machine
How can you travel and discover extraordinary vistas from the confines of your office? Dominique Teufen’s My Travels Through The World On My Copy Machine series, created between 2013 and 2018, proposes an unusual solution. This Swiss artist placed various objects, such as cotton wool, flour, tissue paper, tin foil, pieces of Plexiglas and plastic bags, onto the glass screen on her photocopier. When the printed sheet came out, it revealed an aesthetic surprise. As if by magic, immaculate glaciers, mountain peaks, shorelines and idyllic lakes surrounded by mountains appeared out of nowhere. Without using a camera, Dominique Teufen fabricated a collection of black and white landscapes into an album of fictitious journeys.
Presented in monumental format, these imaginary views stand in striking contrast to the very real panorama of the Grammont mountain and the shores of Lake Geneva.
Selfiepoints
On the occasion of the second edition of Images Gibellina, Dominique Teufen invites viewers to rediscover My Travels Through the World on My Copy Machine, presented in a renewed and immersive form. In this project, the artist turns a simple photocopier into a world-making device. Crumpled paper, plastic, cotton wool or coffee grounds placed on the glass combined with manipulations of the lid transform into snow-covered mountains, lunar craters or misty valleys. Our perception completes the illusion, drawing us into landscapes of uncanny realism. For Images Gibellina, two of these landscapes take the form of Selfiepoints, large-scale backdrops inviting visitors to photograph themselves. By playfully subverting the codes of the selfie, Teufen questions how images claim to confirm or construct reality, pushing this logic to the point of absurdity.
