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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.




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Contact
© 2026｜Roger Weiss

info(at)rogerweiss(dot)ch

X ｜ Insta


© 2026｜Roger Weissinfo(at)rogerweiss(dot)chX ｜ Insta

What precedes identity
is my subject





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

7

2013 - 2022 | Intimate Archive
The gesture before language

Eating is a primeval gesture, derived from the survival instinct. It is the point where two constantly connected dimensions converge: the deepest one, the most interior and mysterious side of the self, and the external structure, where sounds, eyes, mouth, tongue and nerve endings translate what is foreign into nourishment. In a single act, what is outside becomes life.
The body as open threshold
Defence and dissolution
Eating requires an unconditional act of will: the momentary suspension of defences in which the self permits entry. The most guarded part of the body becomes, for an instant, accessible. It is in the passage from what is external and alien toward what is internal and private that life itself is generated, in a single dialectical motion.

The studio as private chamber
Duration as form

Each work is a long-form video recorded in the artist's studio. The camera holds its position. The subject eats. Nothing is directed, nothing is constructed. What accumulates is not documentation: it is intimacy, a private act returned to its original weight. 


Video  
ia210118vd, 2018 (0'45" excerpt)
video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour, 00:14:10

Intimate Archive
Selected works

7.0  ia301114vd, 2014
  • video full HD, 16/9, colour. 00:19:20
7.1   ia281120vd, 2020
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:17:11
7.2  ia011121vd, 2021
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:17:25
7.3  ia270822vd, 2022
  • video Full HD 16/9, colour. 00:16:09
7.4  ia100222d, 2022
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:13:51
7.5  ia271121vd, 2021
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:31:53
7.6  ia170118vd, 2018
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:14:35
7.7  ia310317vd, 2017
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:14:32
7.8  ia040921vd, 2021
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:06:40
7.9  ia161014vd, 2014
  • video 4k Ultra HD, 16/9, colour. 00:33:18
7.0
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
7.8
7.9
Intimate Archive comprises 37 video works developed between 2013 and the present.


Complete archive available upon request.



Project Statement

Intimate Archive is an ongoing video series begun in 2013. Each work records   [...]

  [...]  one or more subjects eating in the artist's studio. The space remains that of production, but the subject inhabits it freely, without an imposed position. The framing is fixed for the duration of each work and redefined for each subject. What changes, every time, is the person and the duration.

The series departs from a precise observation: eating is one of the most intimate acts of the human, the moment in which the body willingly suspends its own defences. It is the point of convergence between two dimensions in constant relation, the innermost self and the external world that enters it. In this gesture, what is foreign becomes nourishment; what is alien becomes, in a single dialectical motion, life itself.

The camera does not intervene. There is no direction, no constructed scenario. The subject eats. Time passes. Across the growing archive, a grammar of private gestures emerges: the particular rhythm of each person's eating, their relationship to silence, to the camera's presence, to their own body. Individuality asserts itself precisely where the gesture is most shared.

The archive remains open. Each new work is a new entry: a private act collected, held, and made visible without being resolved.
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