Le Tremblement Des Certitudes

A new perspective on artist Silvie Defraoui’s work of three decades across media.

Unexpected events in the present can in the long term affect our view of both the past and the future. This fundamental uncertainty characterizes the work of Silvie Defraoui, born in 1935, and also determines her Archives du Futur, the platform for artistic reflection she initiated in 1975 together with her late partner Chérif (1932–94).

This elegant book features some forty works that Defraoui has created since 1994, using the media of video, painting, neon, and photography. Some of them have been newly created for her major solo exhibition at the MCBA in Lausanne in spring 2023 and are published in this book for the first time. All of them bear witness to continuous change and impressively illustrate the metamorphosis of the Archives du Futur, which has now been in existence for almost five decades. Laurence Schmidlin’s book offers a new approach to Defraoui’s artistic ideas and concepts.

Laurence Schmidlin is an art historian and curator and director of the Musée d’art du Valais in Sion, Switzerland.