Diplo Docu – Chronicles of Everyday Diplomacy

Let's push the heavy door of a confidential world, populated by experts, delegates and emissaries confined in a maze of corridors, halls and galleries. Welcome to the backstage area of the international scene; a diplomacy of current affairs, far from the great summits; one for the second roles – in the shadow of the soloists such as Biden, Putin and others. This is the infra-ordinary of international cooperation. This series is about the relationships between men and institutions, about distance and borders, about mingling and compartmentalization, about permanence and metamorphosis, about progress and inertia. Photographed over three years between 2017 and 2019, it questions the making of everyday diplomacy; it questions its tools, practices and evolutions. Who has access to it? What is at stake? What will remain of it? This piece of work is in fact the radiography of a fragile and changing world, that of a multilateral Geneva constantly required to reinvent itself, torn between what will no longer be and what is struggling to become, shaken by the convulsive tectonics of global, federal and cantonal politics. An ankylosed dinosaur for its detractors, a phoenix invariably rising from its ashes for its defenders, the 'Tip of the Lake's Diplomacy' navigates on turbulent waters, between unchanging practices and inevitable upheavals. In the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, this series also raises the question: did the pre-Covid diplomacy bear the seeds of the post-Covid one?