Ausstellung, blog

Artistic Challenges in Mountain Villages

  • Anne-Louise Joël, director of Casa d’Angel.

  • Introductions by the audience, here Hanes Sturzenegger from Dogo in Lichtensteig.

  • Opening presentation by Jonathan Allen.

  • Postcard from the New York ♥ Jubrique project, 2011/12.

  • Celia Längle alongside her audio installation, and Sound Ball by Peter Trachsel.

  • Reading with Celia Längle.

  • Lunch break.

  • Performance by Chris Shields and Leander Albin.

  • Talk by Josiane Imhasly.

  • Celia and Nathalie Sidler, Reclaim the Streets! Die Rutsche auf dem Dorfplatz, Ernen (VS), 2017.

  • Moritz Hossli, Galgenvogel, Ernen, 2017.

  • Michael Hiltbrunner and Linda Herzog, Kirchner Museum Davos.

  • Concluding round table.

– Michael Hiltbrunner and Jonathan Allen

On February 29, 2020 around 30 delegates assembled at Casa d’Angel in Lumbrein in the Grison valley of Lumnezia (Switzerland) to discuss the FUTUR project and broader questions concerning artistic challenges in mountain villages.

During the symposium, local activist Leander Albin (Tersnaus), artist Celia Längle (Zurich), and cultural anthropologist Michael Hiltbrunner (Zurich), curator of the FUTUR exhibition, discussed their contributions to the project. Artistic encounters in other mountain regions were presented by artist and writer Jonathan Allen (London), who also moderated the day together with Michael Hiltbrunner, and by curator Josiane Imhasly (Zur frohen Aussicht, Ernen VS, Samedan, Zurich), and architect Reto Zindel (Chur). A music performance was presented by Chris Shields (synthesizer/computer and voice) and Leander Albin (saxophone and voice). For the final discussion the participants were joined by Casa d’Angel director Anne-Louise Joël (Lumnezia) and artist Agnes Barmettler (Wölflinswil).

Permission to conduct the symposium was granted through an “exceptional allowance” from the cantonal authorities, since the Swiss coronavirus lockdown had been announced the day before. The audience comprised local residents, young and old, attendees from Switzerland and abroad, and some members of the Dalvazza Group from the Swiss Artistic Research Network (SARN). A lunch comprising locally sourced produce was prepared at the closed down school in Lumbrein, following which the symposium took place in the main gallery space of the Casa d’Angel. Below can be found an overview of the conference proceedings, and some of the important discussion points that emerged during the day.

The FUTUR project and exhibition
During 2019, a series of artistic projects took place in the Lumnezia valley that engaged critically with the future of the region’s mountain villages. As Michael Hiltbrunner, curator and organiser of the FUTUR project, explained: “the first round of the exhibition at Casa d’Angel included works from the Fundaziun Capauliana, a regional art collection. Normally it is known for its landscape paintings and portraits of important figures from the region. But I found quite a lot of abstract and experimental art works in the collection. I thought it would be a provocative starting point to explore some of the forms of abstract expression by artists from the canton.” In the second round of the exhibition at Casa d’Angel in the spring 2020, these historical works were joined by new works and documentation of the experimental projects that had taken place as part of the FUTUR by Agnes Barmettler, Jacinta Candinas, Collectiv Tersnaus, Celia Längle, Ella Littwitz and Michal Baroz, and Christian Ratti.

Key questions
Each of the artists’ projects engaged with the Lumnezia valley and its villages in specific and location-sensitive ways, often addressing the role of the imagination and how alternative “scenario-making” can be deployed as a tool for constructing the future. Yet important questions arise: how can artists be sure that their own imaginative engagement and scenario-making are rooted in particular local needs and concerns? Should artists who are not from the region try to bridge local issues with broader global questions? Importantly, the artists considered themselves as guests in the region, and their projects aimed to be respectful to their hosts. But is it possible to remain critical as an artist and still work within the boundaries imposed by local expectations and need? Conversely, since our local hosts were allies in the projects, did they need to warn, or stop, or encourage the invited artists? And within this cultural ecology, what is the role of an institution like Casa d’Angel?  Can a project like FUTUR contribute to local development, and how can the resulting experiences reach a broader audience? Inviting artists to Lumnezia might seem like an attractive and potentially beneficial idea, but what can art actually achieve in local contexts in times of rural depopulation, global economic injustice, and climate crisis?

The artist/artwork as “alien”
The architect Reto Zindel described his own perceptions having grown up in Chur, the capital of Grison: “I grew up in Grison but I also feel strange when I travel in the canton, as if I’m from the ‘outside’. I’m like a local tourist – I will never be totally from here.” A radical artwork that he and artist Peter Trachsel proposed in 1998 was der Ort + der Nichtort = ein Ort als Kunst. Projekt Vereinatunnel (1996-1998). The archive box from this unrealised project was on display during the FUTUR show. The project included a monolithic “house of stairs” in Sasslatsch (outside the village of Susch), as part of the development for the Vereina tunnel. This huge sculptural intervention interacted strongly with the local landscape but not with the local population and as such represented a strong statement of the independence of art. But for Zindel it was a project of transition in Trachsel’s work, one that now feels to him “strange and isolated”, and very different from the later more interactive works by Peter Trachsel, as well as the FUTUR projects in Lumnezia.

Nevertheless, Zindel and Trachsel’s “nonsite with stairs” embodies the idea of an artistic intervention as a moment of “transformative strangeness”. In other words, by introducing radical otherness into a particular context, artists can potentially introduce an “alien” element, one that may even reactivate latent local cultural diversity. All too often, traditional rural communities are assumed to be homogenous and culturally static – almost “monocultures” – but this is never the case. As audience member Thomas Jacobi put it: “Such a project has the chance to reveal the diversity that already exists”.

The search for connection
Of importance to Anne-Louise Joël was the fact that global connectedness and urban networks allow artists to “act differently” whether they are local or not. “If you have an ‘alien’ side,” she explained, “you’re allowed to do certain things that other people in the village can’t. You have a ‘Narrenfreiheit’  – the freedom of the Fool. In Lumnezia, the local inhabitants enjoy somebody who takes a chance. The trick is to push things just so far.” Yet, introducing an “alien” element into local life can also be difficult for the artist. Leander Albin discovered this when he organized the alternative music festival Buatsch with the Collective Tersnaus in collaboration with the FUTUR project. “To go to the local people and invite them to the festival was the most difficult thing to do, to show that they were invited.” In future years he would like to go one step further and include a concert in the old church in the village. “But that only works if the locals accept this provocative invitation – without them, doing a concert in the church would be ‘colonizing’.”

Isolation can become another issue for collectively-minded artists such as Albin. As he noted: “I want to go to the countryside but I don’t want be there all alone. So we wanted to start a village of shared flats.” They are still trying to realise this community accommodation project but it has proved difficult to find viable living spaces in the valley, despite the fact that it suffers greatly from depopulation. Furthermore, when migrating to the valley from elsewhere, it is likely that idealised fantasies about village life will be disenchanted. Anne-Louise Joël moved to Lumnezia around ten years ago and observed that “people up here are not nicer or more romantic then people down in the cities, maybe even less. They’re here because they work here, and they don’t have time to look [distractedly] at the mountains. It’s difficult for some to come here and to live and work with the local people. That might have been part of your [Albin’s] dream, that is, not just to have people around you but to have people that you can connect with.” In her view, a cultural space such as the Casa d’Angel can play an important role in establishing and maintaining a link with the local inhabitants, to “keep up the bridge”. FUTUR artist Agnes Barmettler had concrete experience of this mediating capacity: “Anne-Louise was a connecter for me. I didn’t know anybody here. It was Anne-Louise who gave me contacts. And when I visited them, they were friendly and hospitable.” Barmettler’s project precisely demonstrated the benefits of establishing strong local networks, allowing her to gather participatory communities for her performance events, and to collect objects for her installation from residents who, in some cases, entrusted her with significant and valuable personal artifacts.

The beetle and the swallow
Rather than engaging with “big visions of the future”, artist Celia Längle described her approach as “a conscious and considered use of current resources”. For her, this took the form of an engagement with local cultural traditions and the physical landscapes that were “within her reach”. Standing in her sound installation at Casa d’Angel, Längle gave a reading from her working diary that showed how her project had developed over time. The artist had begun by “collecting the air in Vrin and Greina”, but later focused on the water and fountains in Vrin. When she visited Vrin and met with the residents, she became especially aware of the local importance of religion, music and song. Fusing her interests, she started to record the sound of the wells, each of which for her had a different sonic character, like the tonal voices in a choir. In the local Sursilvan folk music tradition – Sursilvan is the local idiom of Romansh language – the song Canzun dil bau describes a beetle that refuses to work and instead prefers to sing and perform, but who is eventually killed by accident. “I see parallels between the unsympathetic arrogant beetle”, Celia noted, “and my position as an observer but not a contributor. I also see the parallel between visitors from the city who come here to have a calm time in the country atmosphere and to enjoy the idylle.” In order to give voice to these conflicts, Längle chose to manipulate the sounds of the wells in her installation at Casa d’Angel in such a way that they started “singing” Canzun dil bau.

Leander Albin and Chris Shields also chose to draw on the local folk song tradition as part of their experimental music concert during the symposium. The “song of the swallow” is in Vallader – the idiom of Romansh language spoken in the lower Engadine – and includes the following lines: “Che fast qua tü randulin / orasum sün quel manzin / Eu sun qua per t’avisar / tü nu’t dessast maridar” (“What are you doing here, swallow / perched on the end of yonder branch / I’m here to warn you / that you should not get married”). The swallow is a bird that migrates seasonally, very much like the poorer valley inhabitants who tend to leave the Engadine for work, but subsequently engage with cultural life in the tourist hotspots around St. Moritz and the metropolitan centers of northern Italy, or even farther away. And what is the swallow’s destiny when it returns to the mountain village? According to the song, it should not get married or start a family: settling equates potentially to creative bondage. Albin, who grew up in Lumnezia as the son of a farming family, is now a student in Bern. Shields, with parents from the US who live now in Lumnezia, is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Perhaps both have become cultural swallows.

The artist might play the role of the beetle – that is living in the valley but willingly staying outside of the local cultural economy – or play the role of a swallow which needs to migrate between the valley and other places in order to sustain itself. Whichever, it is clear that an artistic intervention within such contexts should be understood as an engagement with an already complex, and even self-reflexive field of activity, rather contributing to an “empty” rural village context. The critical and transformative agencies that FUTUR had intended to activate in these rural contexts were in some sense already part of the local traditions. 

Contested cultural space
Josiane Imhasly, initiator and curator of the bi-annual art event Zur frohen Aussicht (For a happy view) in Ernen (Valais) described her initial approach as “naïve”. Her original desire was to give back something to the village from which her family had originated, which had “given her so much”. She described the upper Valais as something of a contemporary art hinterland, yet one that provided an open context for artists outside of the mainstream art world and where they might develop their work productively. Her project aimed to combine “openness and rootedness” and took an inclusive approach by addressing the local population, but also aimed to maintain the quality standards of the metropolitan art world. This placed her project slightly at odds with the lived reality of locals, but in the best instances resulted in a “provocation” of village’s daily routine. A year during which she curated “especially controversial works” cost her a lot of effort, and yet “the secretary of the commune in Ernen thought this was a really good year. People got into a discussion.” In that particular year, a series of flags were shown in the village square, and a mechanical gold bird appeared and cuckooed in a small round window at the top of the old mayoral building (a former prison). Both works “estranged” the village-square, and suggested a new function for public space, even if this was the result of a “productive malfunction” of such spaces. Jonathan Allen noted that public squares are historically locations in which a certain amount of cultural autonomy is permitted, and even encouraged – think of carnivals and fairs – but where conflict can develop when “freedoms collide”, as might occur, for instance, during a political demonstration. In this sense, a village square can be seen as a “contested space”.

In his presentation for the symposium, Allen described two projects that transpired in neighbouring “pueblos blancos” (white villages) in the mountainous Serranía region of Southern Spain. The first took place in Júzcar, where in 2011 all of the village buildings were painted bright blue as part of a vast publicity campaign for a forthcoming Smurf movie. The village has remained “pitufo blue” (smurf blue) and has subsequently become a tourist hotspot, generating a huge boost to the local economy, despite a recent ban on using Smurf imagery – a ban which residents have largely ignored. Allen compared this example of “chromatic re-territorialisation” with a project that he realised a few months later in the near-by village of Jubrique in collaboration with mayor David Sanchez. The project comprised a cultural exchange between Jubrique and the New-York-based magazine Cabinet, for which Allen had written extensively about the Smurf-related events in Júzcar. Allen had observed that both Cabinet and Jubrique proudly displayed a symbolic coat of arms, and so he arranged for Jubrique’s shield to be paraded around the streets of New York at the same time as Cabinet’s shield was carried through the streets during a festival in Jubrique. Although this mutual performance resulted in cultural links between the two locations ­– a permanent ceramic marker to the “twinning” event can now be found in the village – the economic benefits of the exchange are harder to determine.

Allen noted: “in terms of public engagement and the economic benefits for the region, the Smurf project in Júzcar was far more productive than my slightly esoteric one in Jubrique.” Furthermore, he recognised that his project had been somewhat “autocratic” in its realisation in comparison to the painting of Júzcar, which had taken place only after a public vote, even if the event was ultimately shaped by a massive international corporation (Sony Pictures Animation). Again, the tension between artistic freedom and context remains problematic. However, as Zindel and Trachsel’s project suggested, a more autonomous approach can have its benefits and, as Thomas Jacobi noted from the floor, the power of “new metaphors and new stories” to affect communities should not be underestimated. Certainly not all outcomes should be evaluated simply in economic terms.

Conclusions
The FUTUR project could be considered as a diverse series of encounters that took place within already complex fields of activity and contested spaces. Perhaps artists are always “alien inhabitants” in their working contexts, and the “challenges” which they face are complex and mobile situations simply being “held in tension”, either productively or unproductively so. In some cases, the impact of an artistic intervention may be barely discernable, or operate in liminal ways, thus exemplifying a phrase that Reto Zindel cited from Peter Trachsel, whereby “Kunst muss auch verschwinden können” (“Art also needs to be able to disappear”). In other contexts, art can become the fuel in a motor of local change, with sometimes drastic and unpredictable results.

As the symposium delegates left Lumbrein to return to their homes across Europe, could they have foreseen that within weeks the relationship between the “global” and the “local” would be so dramatically redefined by the coronavirus pandemic, and that imagining future scenarios would become a matter of such urgency. What the FUTUR artists had tested in playful ways – the limits of isolation, agency and change – would soon be exercised in the context of adaption and survival.

Links
FUTUR Lumnezia
Zur frohen Aussicht, Ernen, http://www.zurfrohenaussicht.org
Celia Längle
Jonathan Allen’s article ‘Pitufo Blues’ (2011) for Cabinet magazine
Jonathan Allen’s project in Jubrique