Nowheresville

Nowheresville

A fictitious town in Switzerland

I have been documenting various facets of Swiss life for around 15 years now. The latest series describes Nowheresville, a fictive nonexistent small city in Switzerland. Nowheresville is what is left after subtracting the mountains and the sights from the Swiss landscape, Nowheresville is the Nowheresville of Switzerland, the universal Swiss rural reality, the quintessence of Swiss topography; Nowheresville is nowhere on the map, nowhere in the land, it is a fictitious small town I have assembled from the snippets of Swiss rural reality.

I want to present fragments of our real environment as an anonymous and unidentifiable whole and I want to show that these fragments are interchangeable and under closer scrutiny unreal.

I want to ask questions about people living in this city, their work, their lives, and emotions. I want to ask: “Is there life in Nowheresville?” as one might ask: “Is there life on Mars?” I want to suspend the imaginary population of Nowheresville in space and time, I want to leave them floating in the fog of anonymity.

Juraj Lipscher, 2016