→Sébastien Schnyder

Biography

Sébastien Schnyder (b. 1990, Geneva) is an artist-researcher living and working between Lyon, Bassecourt, and Geneva. Trained in photography at the CEPV in Vevey and then in ceramic design at the School of Applied Arts in Geneva, he continued his studies in visual arts at Villa Arson in Nice, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree and then a Master’s degree in 2023. He is currently a researcher within the ACTH unit at ENSBA Lyon. His work examines the material and symbolic frameworks that organize our environments, not in order to offer a simple reading of them, but to reveal their tensions and contradictions. Through objects that he diverts or recomposes, he questions the logics of use, mechanisms of control, and implicit narratives that shape our everyday gestures. Each sculpture, each filmed sequence becomes a tool for displacement, a means of making visible what, in our spaces, presents itself as neutral but is in fact political. By observing architectures of waiting, industrial infrastructures, or urban dispositifs, he brings to light the ways in which these systems guide our behaviours and organize our relationship to the world. His approach, informed by field research and collaboration with the social sciences, does not seek effect but understanding: understanding how an object acts, how a space imposes itself, how a fiction organizes reality. His works thus function as materialized hypotheses, possible scenarios that allow us to think about our environments differently. They open spaces for discussion and projection, where each person can reconsider what had seemed self-evident. In this displacement, his work reminds us that forms are never innocent and that questioning them always means questioning, in turn, the structures that surround us.