under the the professional guidance of Barbara Keusch i am researching the flora of the swiss alps since 2022.
Barbara Keusch is a highly experienced mountain climber and plantologist. barbara was born in the swiss alps and naturally has build up an immense knowledge of the mountain land-scape, it’s dangers and beauties, the treasures hidden in the most smallest growing life 2000 meter+ above sealevel. barbara shares her knowledge with the team of the herbal garden of the monastry dornach where i was so lucky to meet her for the first time in 2022 while staying as residence artist at this tranquile place. the first herbarium which we produced together that year is a collection of a selected group of garden spices and very common plants of the region. writings from barbara’s memory and floral knowledge transported by her family over generations are accompanied by watercolours which i painted during my stay in dornach.
in 2023 we went on our first mountain trip together and explored the land of the ober/unterengadin . the collection of alp flowers we pressed and preserved is now being worked with and will again be resulting in a collection of 13 ‘portraitures’ within the same frame work as described above for the herbarium but this time being a florarium.
florarium I naturalia (ober/unterengadin)
florarium I (ober/unterengadin) completed with the herbarium specimen, texts by Barbara Keusch, and watercolours from my hand september 2024. during the residency ‘time out’ at monastry dornach (october 2024) we spread out all pages and viewed this first chapter together.
some extracts
meeting, research exchange and short check up in the monastry garden (october 2024)
23 to 27 june 2024 Barbara Keusch arranged our second stay for research purposes in the region wallis. the alpine flair with it’s present roughness of stone desserts is very different to the engadin area. our stay was delayed by massive floods due to an unprecedentely strong thunderstorm that hit this kanton on the day we packed our bags. infrastructural stystems were completely blocked and/or destroyed; this causing major damage to the local human and animal population changing natural waterways and interconnectiviness of forest functions.
our hikes led us to 2650 meter high regions, with ancient glacier traces and a vastness of a prehistoric stone shaped landscape. in the mids of that plain and rather infertile appearing terrain we discovered miniscule floral life, growing milimeter high on the ground. the presence of 4000m high mountains all around us made the origin of the earth become so present and human life on it rather insignificant. at the same time the extensively discussed phenomenon of the ‘awe’ touches all senses and caused an emotion of humbleness.
floraiumII again will lead to a collection of 13 alpine flowers handpainted with a texts describing the origin, the habitat and the meaning of the particular plant for the human ‘condition’ in areas situated 1.500-2.000 m above sea level.
daily report on matterhorn
23-27 june _ every day i took one or two photographs of this impressive alpine massif mostly in the early morning between 6-6.30am.
after a while i got ‘familiar with her’ and saw that actually it is the sphinx under cover.
