On Power, Violence and Resistance – 2026

A text by Elena Karpilova

Nicolas Christol’s pieces explore power, the questions of human strength and its use, the boundaries of violence,  the ethics of relationships, the fine line between benefit and consumption, action and violence. These are the eternal mechanisms that drive societal processes—impossible to tame, yet essential to discuss. “But I tried, didn’t I?” as Randle Patrick McMurphy says in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is precisely through “trying” to speak on serious subjects in any art form that we can get to the truth a little closer. Such jewelry justifies the existence of the craft today, when it is already clear how unethical and damaging the extraction of gold and other metals is. Nicolas seems to spy on the global dystopian mood and the gestures of homo sapiens 2.0 that lead to collective melancholy. This melancholy resonates in Nicolas’s work with a kind of Lynchian quality, which David Foster Wallace once defined as a reality that “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Weapons are a tool for state control over people. In his works Transmutations and To be Continued, Nicolas reflects on the possibility of measuring violence: can a weapon be more or less dangerous? “A less lethal weapon is a weapon,” he says, referencing the facts of weapon use by the police around the world. It is a cunning tool: few governments will deploy lethal force against particular protests. The consequences—measured in lives lost—instantly trigger collective action: people perceive the threat, and instinctively, they unite and resist, forming a real threat to power. Yet by using “light” violence, abusively called non-lethal weaponry, the state manipulates people: it prevents the unification reaction, because there are no dead bodies. Not so terrible. Really? In France, during the 2018–2019 gilets jaunes protests, police using LBD launchers (rubber bullets) blinded over 30 people and several lost their hands. The lives of these individuals will never be the same.

Nicolas explores the colonial past of his country, Switzerland. Formally, it had no colonies. As Colonel Lucas says in Apocalypse Now, “that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist.” Yet, colonialism is more than bloody conquests; it is the exploitation of the asymmetrical attitude of the power to the economic gain. Coffee, sugar, cotton and Swiss chocolate would be impossible without colonial cocoa beans from the subequatorial lands. Slavery and exploitation remain critical topics, but without action, these words are nothing but empty rhetoric. In Portugal, for example, the longest bridge in Europe (built in 1998, long after the Estado Novo era of dictatorship) carries the name Vasco da Gama, infamous for tortures and public executions in India.

Across his works, Christol examines violence from multiple perspectives. We are all subjected to it—through media propaganda, biased schooling as a tool of power, or cities designed for machines rather than humans. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is forced to watch extreme violence with his eyes held open. We have not come far: in China, nowadays soldiers place pins in their uniform collars, sharp end facing the neck. Cold sweat runs down their taut, elongated necks, yet the boy never lowers it. Hardly ever the designer of the pin imagined this usage. Hardly ever corporations reckon with  the wounds they have left on others.  Elena Karpilova