Between the Lines functions as an inquiry into the epistemologies of structure. Through an assemblage of heterogeneous visual materials, ranging from architectural frameworks and agrarian monocultures to orthopedic devices, prison infrastructures, military drills and gridded spatial plans. I’m tracing the manifold ways in which order is imposed, negotiated, and internalized. Drawing from institutional archives, public-domain repositories, vernacular image banks, and my own photographic practice, writing and drawing, I construct an iconography of control that is both historical and contemporary, infrastructural and intimate.

This work may be situated within the historical arc of Fordism, not merely as an economic paradigm but as what Antonio Gramsci called a “regime of social discipline” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks) - a system that sought not only to rationalize labor but to reshape comportment, perception, and affect. Fordism’s legacy persists as what David Harvey terms “time-space compression” (Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity), wherein efficiency becomes both a logistical necessity and a moral imperative. Its visual grammar, repetition, alignment, symmetry, resonates with what Michel Foucault described as “the microphysics of power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish), where control is exercised not only through force, but through spatial and procedural organization.
Yet Between the Lines resists a reductive framing of structure as inherently prohibitive. The project also invokes voluntary systems of organization, such as pattern-making, quilting logic, and board game mechanisms, forms of structuration that align more closely with what Johan Huizinga defined as “play as ordered freedom” (Homo Ludens) or Roger Caillois’ distinction between paidia (spontaneity) and ludus (rule-bound creativity) (Man, Play and Games). These systems demonstrate that rules may constrain in order to enable, that form can be generative rather than disciplinary.

Such contrasts compel a reconsideration of structure not as a binary of freedom versus constraint but as a spectrum of governance and participation. Our relationship to systems is not merely oppositional but reciprocal. My work oscillates between architectures of coercion and architectures of cooperation, asking where consent ends and conditioning begins.

Thus, Between the Lines operates as a phenomenological study of infrastructural power. It shifts the critical task away from rejecting structure altogether toward discerning which structures emancipate and which merely simulate agency. In doing so, it foregrounds an ethical proposition: that the challenge of contemporary life is not to escape systems, but to rewrite them.


The project is ongoing (of course...)



photographies for the magazine FOAM
In limbo : “What can photography do ?”
2020, issue 57
carte blanche by Elisa Medde









Visual research :