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Roger Weiss is a Swiss visual artist. His work investigates what precedes identity: the body before the subject, the gesture before function, presence before narrative.

Working across photography, video and installation, he constructs images through fragmentation, recomposition and temporal modulation. Developed over more than two decades, his practice treats the human figure as a constructed field of perception, time and presence.

He graduated with honors from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.        

His long-term research began with the human body as a constructed surface. In Human Dilatations, each work is manually assembled from hundreds of macro photographs of the same subject. The body is fragmented, reconfigured and enlarged until it no longer corresponds to a single photographic instant, but to the total time of its construction.

Over time, this investigation has expanded from the body to gesture and habitat. The figure, the domestic act and the spatial condition become fields in which the human appears before being reduced to identity, function or narration.

His work has been exhibited and published internationally, with appearances in books, exhibitions, interviews and editorial contexts concerned with the body, identity and contemporary visual culture. Selected collaborations, including Apple and Wolford / Amina Muaddi, extend his research into the wider field of image production without separating it from its artistic matrix.







Contact

© 2026|Roger Weiss

info(at)rogerweiss(dot)ch

XInsta


© 2026|Roger Weissinfo(at)rogerweiss(dot)chXInsta

What precedes identity
is my subject





Bodies, gestures and habitats as presences before name, role and narrative.

5

2019–2022 | Genealogy of a Body
Genealogical Inversion


Genealogical research traditionally moves backwards, tracing lineage toward a point of origin. Here the direction is reversed. The series begins with already formed subjects and advances through successive hybridisations, gradually condensing into a single figure that contains all prior combinations. Origin is not behind. It lies ahead.
The contemporary totem
Condensation as Form

Over 3,000 macro photographs of human subjects are processed and hybridised across multiple stages, starting from twelve source figures. Each passage introduces a deviation that prevents the stabilisation of a linear descent. The resulting figure does not correspond to an individual identity, but to a field of accumulated transformations. A body that contains the whole without coinciding with anything specific.
Process and Instability
Image as Sequence


Each work is constructed through the manual assembly of hundreds of macro photographs, first organised as preparatory studies and then consolidated into a single image. The sequence maintains an apparent legibility. At closer range, this coherence fractures. The genealogical system collapses into a process of continuous redefinition
Hybridisation sequence of Genealogy of a Body series

Top row: parental subjects.
Second row: first hybrid generation.
Third row: second hybrid generation.
Coloured markers indicate the contribution of each original subject. 


Genealogy of a Body
Selected works

5.0  s11b(140620_272ph)+s6b(170620_207ph), 2020
5.1   s1_210719_100ph, 2019
5.2  s10_220220_185ph, 2020
5.3  s3(061019_216ph)+s5(221019_211ph), 2019
5.4  s2(210719_131ph)+s5(221019_211ph)+sunburn, 2019
5.0
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
Genealogy of a Body comprises 30 photographic works developed between 2019 and 2022.


Complete archive available upon request.



Video-Zoom works
s1_210719_100ph,  2019




Project Statement

Genealogy of a Body departs from a structural inversion of genealogical   [...]

[...]
   logic. Instead of tracing identity back to an origin, the series constructs a forward movement in which the body emerges through successive hybridisations. Identity is not inherited. It is produced through accumulation.

Each figure results from the stratification of multiple subjects, assembled into dense photographic constructions that no longer correspond to a single instant, but to the total time of their formation. The image becomes the site of a process rather than its representation.

Preparatory collage studies, assembled in the artist’s notebooks, establish the initial conditions of this process.
Preparatory collage study,  notebook

#000_notebook_43ph-s6b_170620_207_4_5ph, 2020

The final figure functions as a contemporary totem: a form of condensation in which differences persist without resolving. It does not represent an origin, but an endpoint that contains all preceding transformations without stabilising them.

Presented as photographic prints, the works manifest this accumulation as a dense, unresolved visual field.
Fine art print. Medium format  

Image Size | 150 × 105 cm
Sheet Size | 165 × 111.8 cms

s11b(140620_272ph)+s6b(170620_207ph), 2020

The series does not reconstruct a genealogy. It exposes its instability. The origin does not precede the process. It emerges from it. What remains is an open sequence in which the body coincides with the transformations that generate it.

The Video-Zoom works extend this condition, traversing the image and revealing structures that remain latent in the print.
TVideo-Zoom works
s11b(140620_272ph)+s6b(170620_207ph), 2020
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