Silvie and Chérif Defraoui—Archives du Futur: 14 Commentaries 1984–2020

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An exploration of the work of Silvie and Chérif Defraoui, important pioneers of multidisciplinary and multimedia art and of art education in Switzerland.

Swiss artist Silvie Defraoui, born in 1935, realized a significant part of her work beginning in 1975 together with her husband Chérif . Silvie and Chérif Defraoui compiled their photo and video works, installations, sculptures, and performances under the title Archives du Futur. They taught together at Geneva’s École supérieure des Beaux-Arts , where they founded the legendary studio Média Mixte and taught a number of renowned artists.

The Archives du Futur, to which Silvie Defraoui has continued adding works since Chérif’s premature death, has been made available as a digital catalog raisonné to browse online. This book accompanies, supplements, and expands on the digital documentation. It gathers fourteen commentaries on individual works of the two artists by distinguished art theorists and curators, originally published from 1984 onwards in various art journals and exhibition catalogs or newly written for this book. They reflect on the artists’ joint oeuvre as well as on work created independently by Silvie Defraoui. Interviews with her and selected lecture texts from the couple’s shared teaching activities shed light on their artistic stance and thematic focuses.

The volume invites an exploration of an artistic body of work that is highly topical through its merging of dualities—memory and the present, Orient and Occident, man and woman, tradition and invention.