Across Switzerland, Matthias Förster aims his camera at the seams where the built world meets the wild in Homo Faber and Divine Providence, a deadpan survey of cell masts, clipped hedges and snowbound lamps.
The Latin tag homo faber names the human as maker, the species that shapes its surroundings rather than submitting to them. Matthias Förster sets that ambition against its limit. Photographing across Switzerland, he looks for the points where human tidiness runs up against weather, terrain and chance, and finds his comedy precisely in the gap. The country he documents is one of the most managed landscapes on earth, and the work treats that management as both achievement and joke.
His subjects are the small negotiations people stage with the land. Two transmission masts rise behind a yellow warehouse, a lone palm tree planted beneath them as if to argue the climate is milder than it is. A nuclear cooling tower exhales its plume directly above a suburban hedge and a parked orange hatchback. A high-voltage pylon straddles a single gabled house, its cables fanning out over a clipped conifer screen. Each frame stacks the domestic against the industrial until the scale stops making sense.
A second grammar runs through the series: the urge to hold ground in place. Förster keeps returning to the hardware of containment, gabion baskets packed with stone, dry-stone retaining walls capped with chain-link, geotextile sheeting pinned across a fog-bound slope below a fortress wall, a plane tree with its trunk whitewashed and wrapped. Hedges are pruned into smooth green mounds that swallow a roofline. The effort to keep nature legible is everywhere, and it is never quite finished.
The method is deadpan and frontal. Förster shoots in flat, overcast light or hard winter sun, drains the palette to greys, browns and muted greens, and almost never includes a person. That absence lets the objects speak: a pink stretch limousine marooned on wet grass in the fog, a pink roller door bolted to a red metal shed, a gout of insulation foam bursting from a broken window in a black-tiled facade. The humour is dry, and it never tips into mockery.
What holds the pictures together is the title's second half. Divine providence is what the maker cannot schedule: the snow that buries a wrought-iron lamp until it wears a white wig, the mountain that dwarfs every wall built to frame it, the excavation pit gouged below a tidy row of apartment blocks. Förster photographs the seam between the two and leaves the verdict open. Control and chance share the same frame, and neither one wins.
