One of the first lessons that we all learn during any photography course is that when we are looking at a picture of a chair what we see is not the actual piece of furniture but a visual representation of it. Period. From that very moment we start questioning any single image around us, wondering about its authenticity, its right context, its relation to its subject and whether it can be looked upon as a valid substitute for the latter. Very often the reply to this last enquiry is affirmative, since modern communication has shifted from the verbal to the visual mode and we are all accustomed to experience anything (war, sport, sex, travel, art) through our own eyes instead of physically taking part in it. No wonder that nowadays sight is our most developed sense and the one we trust above all the others. It is exactly for this particular reason that the works of Swiss photographer Stefan Burger strike us as unexpected, charged with a deadpan irony and, above all, multisensorial.

When Burger juxtaposes pictures and tridimensional things such as doors or ladders, he is not just assembling mixed-media installations, but rather challenging our habit of standing before images as though we were another flat surface sliding in front of the museum’s walls. Watching a composition made up of photographs and solid objects makes us ponder on the role of pictures in our culture (even more so when the objects close to them are the same as those they represent) and the high position they hold in it. To put it simply, very often a slide show of the Yosemite national park in California is much more appreciated than an actual trip to the real place, and what Burger does is confront us with a postcard of a tree in one hand and the real tree in the other. Therefore, our relationship with the artwork stops being purely visual and becomes tactile, while light is no longer the only measure to appreciate it but just one of the many axes of a multidimensional graph in which space, volume, sound, and any other variable belonging to the physical world acquire the same importance. Moreover, when the object steps out of the surface of the photograph it takes back its original function (a door can be opened, a ladder can be climbed) and consequently we take on a new one: from passive onlookers we turn into acting beings with a tool at our disposal.

After all, when taking into consideration the artworks of Stefan Burger, we are led to think about them as multitasking installations, since they require us to paricipate with our whole body, not just our eyes. It is of little relevance if we really perform the action suggested by the physical objects: what matters is that they pose questions and arouse issues that go far beyond the photographic field, such as the bodily experience of a piece of art and, above all, the possibility of tearing apart the walls that separate galleries and museums from the world outside.