My Travels Through The World On My Copy Machine by Swiss artist Dominique Teufen, created between 2013 and 2018 in her studio, presents a series of black and white landscapes fabricated entirely with a photocopier and everyday materials. The project examines illusion, perception, and the shifting nature of photographic reality in the digital era.
The series interrogates the boundary between appearance and reality, engaging with how visual memory is shaped by collective image culture. Drawing from a sculptural background, Teufen constructs miniature topographies from crumpled paper, flour, plastic, and cotton wool, transforming them into convincing alpine vistas or seascapes. Her process resists pre-visualization; instead, she guides the materials and copier until a landscape begins to surface. These temporary arrangements, created entirely by hand on a copier bed, are transferred onto photocopies, which are then photographed and enlarged well beyond the original A3 format, amplifying the illusion of vast, fictional terrains.
Visually, the images are rendered in nuanced grayscale, dictated by the copier's mechanics. Shadows, depth, and highlights are manipulated through exposure adjustments—opening the copier lid creates darkness, closing it increases brightness. The result is a visual language that feels both photographic and sculptural, recalling vintage travel photographs or National Geographic landscapes, yet betraying no real geography. The short depth of field intrinsic to the machine accentuates textures and forms, contributing to a visual ambiguity.
Acknowledged by the HSBC Prize (2019) and articulated in a Xavier Barral monograph, the work circulated from Arles to Vevey, where overscale prints complicated viewers’ sense of place. The sequence of awards and exhibitions has kept its central question—what makes a landscape believable—actively in play.
