L'APPARTEMENT SESSION 5 : Carte blanche à Riverboom

Riverboom 2002-2022
Greatest Hits – Coming Home

Exhibition: 14 December 2022 – 19 Fevruary 2023
Housewarming Party: Wednesday, 14 December, 6 pm

For its fifth session of exhibitions, Images Vevey has given free rein to the Italian-Swiss collective Riverboom that has been based in an apartment in Vevey for the past twenty years.

Riverboom was founded in 2002 by a small group of aspiring war journalists in a valley in north-west Afghanistan, through which the river Boom flows. Over the past twenty years, Riverboom has published books, created exhibitions, produced films, and organised parties, while predominantly being a stage for inner struggles. The Riverboomers, Claude Baechtold, Edoardo Delille, Gabriele Galimberti, Serge Michel, Alexandre Tzonis and Paolo Woods are photographers, filmmakers, graphic designers, journalists, and writers. Having surrendered their youthful vitality for the banal obligations that come with age, they are making the most of the invitation extended by L'Appartement to flaunt, as most ageing stars do, their soon to be long-gone 'Greatest Hits' and the five founding principles of their (dys)functioning.

RIVER-ROOMS (PRINCIPLES I TO III)
While having total leeway has focused on the five guiding principles that have defined Riverboom's pursuits for twenty years, each room of LES CHAMBRES features one in particular: 'COLLABORATION', where we discover that, to quote John Lennon, "fighting is the answer", then 'LIFE IS BETTER WHEN YOU ARE STUPID', the collective's explicit credo and, finally, 'SEE THE BEAUTY', where visitors are encouraged to lose themselves in a new aesthetic canon. In LE COULOIR, the apartment corridor, the 50 shades of red solar project links the first three principles.

SWITZERLAND VS THE WORLD (PRINCIPLE IV)
Treat life as a constant playground: This is the fourth founding principle, which can be summed up in a single catchword. 'PLAYGROUND'. This is the core of the unsolicited advice Riverboom gives to future generations on how to live and contemplate the world while having fun. To illustrate this premise, the collective presents in LE SALON an environment inspired by their most famous publication (possibly their only real greatest hit!): Switzerland versus The World, displayed in an enlarged format.

RIVER-BOOKS (PRINCIPE V)
The Riverboom collective's fifth principle, 'TEST THE LIMITS', urges us to question society's rules and customs with the aim of transcending them. In LE CINEMA, while on screen the entire twenty-year collection of Riverboom publications scrolls by in the hands of monstrous creatures, the tables serve to display covers of numerous editorial projects that never saw the light of day, printed on white notepads: How to discern what is feasible in light of what is not.

MEMORY (BONUS)
In LE COULOIR, as a bonus, Riverboom proposes an entertaining interactive installation based on 'versus', the collective's well-known signature series. It is presented in a myriad of ways, contrasting photographs taken around the world. In a parody of the popular 'Memory' matching pairs game, visitors of all sizes, ages, nationalities, genders, and creeds are encouraged to form pairs of pictures of the most common and most unusual stereotypes.