Photo Basel 2025

Diego Brambilla

Structural Accidents

By Daniel Blochwitz

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls

― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s book, the Zurich-based Swiss-Italian artist Diego Brambilla conceived a body of work titled Structural Accidents, in which something similar takes place: Reality is not something fixed or directly accessible, but rather exists in an act of narration, in deferral, in mental and linguistic constructs. The final photograph contains the memory of a sculpture modeled from trash and urban debris—but already gone. It is the imprint of a gesture erased, the phantom of a structure dismantled. Each image is less a document than a residue—a trace of a trace. An initial sketch in graphite turns an idea into an object, made from styrofoam, pieces of metal or plastic, simple tape and wires, before becoming a push-processed silver-based negative, then scanned to produce an inter-neg that serves as the source for the final photographic print on fiber-based paper. In this convoluted but deliberate process of extended latency and decelerated image-making, Brambilla’s photography becomes not a record of the world, but a slow unbuilding of it.

In his looped and layered studio and darkroom practice, which he himself calls “an elaborate series of passages that function similarly to a set of rules”, Brambilla experiments with modest materials and hybrid processes, often ready-made, found, unstable, or provisional in nature — gestures and artefacts of a world apparently already consumed. The resulting images offer no clear referent, but instead  hold a fragile geometry—angles, surfaces, scars of light. This makes Brambilla part of a generation of photo-artists, like Yamini Nayar or Yuval Yairi, who bring a distinctly introspective and materialist rigor to a process that does not capture the world but constructs it—as ephemeral sculptures, improvised architectures, or staged models—only to destroy or dissolve them after photographing them. In this way, Brambilla unsettles the indexical promise of photography. The image becomes not a window but a palimpsest—a ghost structure, suspended between object and afterimage.

Structural Accidents may not invent new forms, but it recombines familiar strategies—assemblage, analog processing, ephemeral sculpture, photographic abstraction—with clarity and intent. The appeal lies not in singular innovation, but in a kind of durational care: each work feels thoroughly processed, mediated, touched, taken apart, returned. Brambilla photographs not just what’s in front of the lens, but the gap between matter and memory, surface and process, utopia and dystopia. And like in Italo Calvino’s book, in which each city is a variation of another, Brambilla’s images echo each other while referencing absence or repetition. What appears to be a form of something tangible is in fact a ruin of perception: a site or thing that no longer is, or never was, yet remains as a trace — suspended between simulation and remembrance. In a time of visual saturation and synthetic precision, his work slows perception, asking us to see not just what’s shown, but—perhaps—what may be missing. His images resist seamlessness and act as quiet revolts against the ubiquity of digital culture: a reminder that images have a body, that seeing is sculptural, and that sometimes the most lasting images contain their origin and meaning “like the lines of a hand” (Calvino).