Marco Poloni

From Photographer to Investigative Artist: Documentary After the 1990s

Poloni was born in Amsterdam in 1962 and has worked across photography, moving image, and installation. His 2010 exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern presented his work as historical research combining photography and film, emphasizing his treatment of facts as an “open historical arrangement” rather than a closed narrative^*2. His exhibition history records activity across Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy from the late 1990s onward; in the 2000s, Passengers, Displacement Island, and The Majorana Experiment became central projects^*11.

In Europe during this period, border control, migration across the Mediterranean, globalization, and surveillance technologies unsettled the assumption that showing the scene would make an event legible. Poloni’s work has been described as research into precisely this difficulty of seeing, tracing subjects who fall outside systems of social control^*1. Prix Elysée likewise presents him across the roles of photographer, filmmaker, and artist, and selected him for support toward a photobook and new work^*7.

The Mediterranean and the Island: Where Movement and Information Intersect

For Poloni, the Mediterranean is not simply a landscape backdrop. An announcement for The Analogue Island describes the project as indexing the Mediterranean’s “plots and problems” through film, photography, and installation, addressing social invisibility and the relations among power, subjectivity, and ideology^*14. The Analogue Island Bureau, which he later founded, was conceived as an ongoing archive that collects and rewrites anthropological narratives and geopolitical scripts around the Mediterranean^*16.

Displacement Island: Lampedusa as a 69-Image “Non-Cartographic Atlas”

Displacement Island (2006) treats Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, as an ensemble of 69 images. A Brill study analyzes the work as a “non-cartographic atlas” that connects heterogeneous visual materials in constellations instead of fixing geography, history, and politics into a classificatory grid^*12. Campagne Première’s project page documents both the images and the installation structure, in which 69 pigment prints are arranged in several clusters^*9.

Lampedusa brings together different forms of movement: tourists and migrants or refugees attempting to reach Europe. An exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein presented the island’s landscape as a place where political borders overlap with tourist imagery^*8. Es Baluard also included Displacement Island in a 2015 exhibition on the Mediterranean, situating the work within questions of maritime politics and movement^*19.

Photography becomes material for comparing who makes images of the same place and for what purpose. By placing his own photographs alongside tourist imagery, press photographs, and other existing visual material, Poloni shows how an image’s meaning depends on circulation and editorial arrangement as well as on the photographer’s intention.

The Majorana Experiment: Exhibiting Uncertain Evidence Without Solving a Disappearance

The Majorana Experiment combines photographs, film, lightboxes, stereoscopic devices, and historical documents around the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who disappeared in 1938. Campagne Première describes it as an “open narrative dispositif,” underscoring a structure in which multiple media do not converge on a single answer^*10. The Kunsthalle Bern exhibition likewise presented the disappearance without closing it into the solution of a mystery, bringing the history of science, war, nuclear physics, and movement across the Mediterranean into contact^*5.

In Majorana Eigenstates, an actor plays Majorana while the parallax of two cameras splits the same figure between two locations^*18. The reenactment does not fill gaps in the record as fact; it makes visible how much what is missing from historical sources depends on performance and conjecture. roots§routes discusses The Majorana Experiment and The Analogue Island as a continuous investigation of invisibility as a political, geographical, and narrative condition^*17.

Why the Migrants Themselves Are Absent: Absence as Ethics and Method

The near absence of people in Displacement Island was not the result of an inability to approach the subject. In an interview with SCHIRN, Poloni says that his concern was with questions of representation rather than journalism, and that early in his work on Lampedusa he decided not to show the migrants themselves^*21. Instead, he mixes traces such as clothing and cigarette packs found on the beach with tourist postcards, travel catalogs, and news images, leaving viewers unable to determine which photographs are his and which are appropriated. Flattening authorship and refusing to concentrate the ethical burden in one forceful evidentiary image are structural decisions in the work.

In a 2021 interview in Image & Narrative, Poloni is even more explicit. Because photography has difficulty conveying the full intricacy of human beings and suffering, he explains, Displacement Island began from the decision “not to represent migrants,” using metaphor and metonymy to generate a different mental image^*22. In the same conversation, he refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s “striated space” and Latour’s actor-network theory, describing the Mediterranean as a fluid space crossed by human and nonhuman flows—tourists, migrants, soldiers, commodities, aircraft, and more^*22. His refusal to condense the subject into the face of a single victim was also a method for presenting the Mediterranean as a field where numerous actors and institutions intersect.

“Narrative Montage”: Photography, Moving Image, and Documents on Equal Terms

Photography does not monopolize the wall in Poloni’s installations. At the Centre culturel suisse, Codename: Osvaldo combined photographs, moving images, documents, and research to construct a series of case studies around the less widely known history of guerrilla struggle in Bolivia and Monika Ertl^*3. A Paris Art review likewise describes an exhibition in which photographs and texts supplement fragments of political history while viewers construct their own route through the material^*4.

Why Arrange Multiple Images as a “Constellation”?

Poloni avoids a structure in which one photograph stands for the subject as a whole. Speaking about Displacement Island, he explains that individual images are intentionally treated as “flat,” without self-contained artistic depth, so that relations emerge only when they are brought together^*21. He also makes the distinction between his own photographs and appropriated images invisible to the viewer, flattening authorship and deliberately reducing each image’s power to represent the subject on its own^*21. Each image is kept from becoming self-sufficient so that no single photograph can stand for migration, tourism, the military, or the island itself. Meaning develops in the intervals between adjacent images. In both books and installations, fragments are arranged as constellations whose relations viewers must trace.

Combining moving images, photographs, documents, and exhibition space allows the same fact to be examined through different temporalities and kinds of evidence. Film brings duration; photography brings arrest; documents carry sources; exhibition space creates sequence. Istituto Svizzero describes the Analogue Island Bureau’s output as spanning film, photography, installation, and text, connecting individual works to an ongoing body of Mediterranean research^*13.

Making Photography’s Limits Part of the Work to Address What Cannot Be Seen

SUPSI’s presentation of A Theory of Waves connects the sea, waves, scientific measurement, and apparatuses of social control, asking through photography and research how “invisible subjects” emerge from such systems^*1. LOOP Barcelona likewise presents Poloni as an artist who uses moving image and photography to address history, movement, and political memory^*6. Institutions that produce invisibility, gaps in sources, and limits on viewpoint all become material for the work.

Photography Now’s exhibition record includes Displacement Island at the Centre de la photographie Genève, The Majorana Experiment at Kunsthalle Bern, and Persian Gulf Incubator at FOTOHOF, showing the work’s reception across both specialist photography institutions and contemporary-art venues^*15. Photography functions as a primary medium for examining the conditions under which political information becomes an image.

From Witness Photography to an Arrangement of Research

Poloni does not reject photography’s evidentiary force; he develops a method in which evidence does not conclude within a single image. Brill calls Displacement Island a “constellation” because knowledge is produced by relations among heterogeneous images^*12. The Majorana Experiment at Kunsthalle Bern likewise leaves uncertainty in place rather than integrating its materials into one conclusion^*2.

This method departs from a classical documentary model in which the photographer possesses the decisive moment, making research, sourcing, editing, and exhibition part of authorship. The critical record preserved in Campagne Première’s press archive shows that Majorana and Analogue Island have been discussed across contemporary art, moving-image culture, and visual studies as well as photography^*20.

The Ethics of Political Images: Absent Subjects and Gaps in the Archive

Histories of migration, disappearance, guerrilla struggle, and nuclear science risk reducing lived experience to a single explanation when they become artworks. Poloni’s case-study format leaves gaps, contradictions, and different temporalities in the material. Stella Maris describes the Analogue Island Bureau as an “index,” emphasizing a structure to which multiple narratives continue to be added^*16.

The Ethics and Limits of Displacement Island: A Reassessment Through Surveillance Studies

Surveillance scholar Torin Monahan discusses Displacement Island in Crisis Vision (2022), viewing the decision to keep refugees’ bodies outside the frame as a way of avoiding renewed exposure of vulnerable people to surveillance and objectification. In his reading, fragments such as life jackets, detention facilities, military zones, and tourists are separated by blank space, prompting viewers to infer connections among the institutions and places that regulate movement rather than concentrate on one image of individual suffering^*27.

The same study identifies blind spots produced by that choice. Monahan argues that death, loss, and destruction are scarcely represented, and that the history linking Italian colonialism in North and East Africa to contemporary migration is difficult to read from the work itself^*27. Poloni’s use of absence supports an ethics of caution, but withholding images can also thin out the historical background. Displacement Island offers no solution; it returns to the viewer the documentary choice of what to make visible and what to leave outside the frame.

A 2026 “Borderscape” Study: Fragments and Absence Reconsidered as Method

Two decades after it was made, Displacement Island continues to appear in research on the representation of migration. A 2026 article in the Journal of Intercultural Studies discusses European borders as dynamic “borderscapes” where language, material traces, and human actions intersect, examining Poloni’s work in detail as an earlier example that overlays Lampedusa’s geography, history, politics, aesthetics, and signs^*26. The article focuses on his refusal to show migrants or border guards directly, and on the way traces such as clothing, cigarette packs, military vessels, and barbed wire are mixed into a heterogeneous image field^*26. The 2006 decision not to photograph people also became a way to read the border as an accumulation of institutions that produce what can and cannot be seen, instead of representing it through a single dramatic event.

Poloni does not seek to represent political reality with a stronger single image. He exhibits what images show, what they miss, and how they become knowledge when combined with other sources. His method parallels a broader shift after the 1990s in which photography came to function as a site for testing information as well as a medium for making individual pictures.

In Relation to Allan Sekula: Reading the Sea as a Chain of Institutions

The comparison with Allan Sekula has a direct basis in scholarship. The peer-reviewed volume “Disassembled” Images: Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art, published by Leuven University Press, considers Sekula’s legacy through ecological disaster in maritime space, geopolitics, solidarity, and critical realism; its section “Maritime Failures and Imaginaries” includes Poloni’s The Land Seen by the Sea^*23. A Burlington Contemporary review likewise groups recent maritime investigations by Poloni, Trevor Paglen, and Véréna Paravel/Lucien Castaing-Taylor under the politics of recording, discussing them as questions that continue after Sekula^*24.

The shared point is an understanding of the sea as an institutional space linking labor, logistics, borders, the military, tourism, and movement, rather than a scenic backdrop. Poloni, however, deliberately erases distinctions of authorship between his own photographs and appropriated images, generating narrative through combinations of traces from which human figures are absent. As he explains, he deliberately keeps each image “flat,” allowing meaning to emerge only through combination^*21, Poloni thus moves beyond Sekula’s photo-text critical documentary toward constellations in which even the question of who made an image remains unstable.

“Unfinished Ruins” and a Connection to Robert Smithson

Poloni’s points of comparison are not confined to documentary photography. In discussing the unfinished Sicilian dam in The Analogous Dam, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève connects the work to Robert Smithson’s idea of public projects that never reach completion becoming “ruins in reverse” within the landscape^*25. Photography is used to read the distorted temporality produced by politics, funding, organized crime, and stalled development. Here the Mediterranean appears as a space where suspended institutions and unfinished plans leave traces on the ground.