Art as a Varnish 2021

Building A, in HEAD Geneva, now painted blue and dedicated to artistic education, was once a site of industrial power—home to the Hispano-Suiza factory, which evolved from luxury car manufacturing into arms production during the 20th century. What now appears as a beacon of creativity is layered over a history shaped by violence, machinery, and transformation.

Our intervention involved hiding small plastic toy soldiers throughout the building—inside crevices, under stairs, near vents. This quiet infiltration serves as a symbolic excavation: not to glorify war, but to resist institutional forgetting.

The architectural renovation and cultural repurposing of the building suggest a kind of cleansing—a narrative shift from conflict to creation. But what is lost when spaces are rebranded without acknowledging their past? Can art truly inhabit these walls without confronting the contradictions they contain?

The soldiers we’ve embedded do not fight, but neither do they rest. They persist—silent, still, and alert—reminding us that memory is not an aesthetic layer, but a responsibility.

This work is not a condemnation of the present, but a gesture against aesthetic amnesia.

Collaboration with Gian Losinger