Under the professional guidance of Barbara Keusch, I have been researching the flora of the Swiss Alps since 2022.
Barbara Keusch is a highly experienced mountain climber and botanist. She was born in the Swiss Alps and has naturally developed an immense knowledge of the mountain landscape, its dangers and beauties, and the treasures hidden in the smallest forms of life at elevations over 2000 meters above sea level.
Barbara shares her expertise with the team of the herbal garden at the monastery in Dornach. I was fortunate to meet her for the first time in 2022 while staying as a resident artist at this tranquil place.
The first herbarium 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, passed down through her family over generations, are accompanied by watercolors that I painted during my stay in Dornach.
In 2023, we went on our first mountain trip together and explored the land of Ober/Unterengadin.
hortus siccus I naturalia (Ober/Unterengadin)
hortus siccus I (ober/unterengadin) was completed with the herbarium specimens, texts by Barbara Keusch, and watercolors from my hand in September 2024. during the residency ‘Time Out’ at the monastery Dornach (October 2024), we spread out all the pages and viewed this first chapter together.
some text extracts by Barbara Keusch
some watercolors (the copies)
meeting, research exchange and short check up in the monastry garden (october 2024)
From June 23 to 27, 2024, Barbara Keusch arranged our second research stay in the Wallis region. The alpine atmosphere, with its present roughness of stone deserts, is very different from the Engadin area. Our stay was delayed by massive floods caused by an unprecedentedly strong thunderstorm that hit this canton on the day we packed our bags. Infrastructural systems were completely blocked and/or destroyed, leading to major damage to the local human and animal populations, as well as changes in natural waterways and the interconnectedness of forest functions.
Our hikes took us to regions at 2,650 meters elevation, where we encountered ancient glacier traces and a vast, prehistoric stone-shaped landscape. Amidst this plain and seemingly infertile terrain, we discovered tiny floral life, growing millimeters high on the ground. The presence of 4,000-meter-high mountains surrounding us made the origin of the Earth feel very present, while human life seemed rather insignificant. At the same time, the extensively discussed phenomenon of ‘awe’ touched all our senses and evoked a feeling of humbleness.
hortus siccus II features a collection of 13 alpine flowers, hand-painted with texts describing their origin, habitat, and significance for the human ‘condition’ in areas situated between 1,500 and 2,000 meters above sea level.
some text extracts by Barbara Keusch
a couple of watercolors (the copies)
13 july – 19 july 2025
hortus siccus III -Wiler, Lötschental/CH
After a natural disaster, the village of Blatten was almost entirely devastated on May 28, 2025. A landslide triggered by a glacier collapse buried and destroyed large parts of the village. Blatten is the northernmost settlement in this valley, surrounded by a massive Alpine landscape with peaks rising to nearly 4,000 meters, the Bietschhorn being one of the most prominent.
When we arrived in Wiler, the view toward the disaster area revealed a vast layer of grey debris. For someone who had known the region before the event, the scene felt almost apocalyptic. To me, the sight was reminiscent of the retreating Morteratsch Glacier we had seen in 2023—yet on an entirely different scale. Still, it was closely connected to the same underlying forces: climate change and the melting of permafrost in the Alpine region.
Army helicopters flew soldiers into the area for investigation. Every morning and evening, as we set out for our excursions and returned to the cabin, we were confronted with this new reality, one that lent the scenery a slightly bitter undertone. The quietness—broken only by the sound of helicopters—spoke of a profound shift currently affecting nature and all living elements. It is difficult to capture the memory of other people’s experiences in words, but simply listening to the wind and walking through the silent streets of the village evoked a distinctly unsettling feeling.
Despite this, we continued our research tours and once again encountered astonishing floral species, documenting several of them for the archive. As we were staying in a private cabin, we were able to prepare dinners using findings from our daily tours, such as nettle, clover, strawberries, leek, and other plants. Guide and botanist, Barbara Keusch, was particularly affected this time, as she associates this region with many family visits and memories from her early childhood.
hortus siccus – flora of the alpine mountains 1:26
a side path that inprinted itself naturally in Zermatt/Wallis, 2024
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.
