series HERITAGE

Born in Switzerland at a time when 'global warming' was not conceived as an existing fact, when I spent time with my parents hiking in the Alps, glaciers were still omnipresent and the image of high mountains covered in snow and ice unquestionable important elements defining my sense of Swiss identity. How would 'global warming' and the rapidly melting away of glaciers, there gradual but unstoppable disappearance after thousands of years of what became part of the "Swiss identifier" affect the very self-identity as Swiss Citizens? How would 'global warming' affect tourists’ perception of Switzerland, considering instilled expectations over a century? Instead of ice and snow, bare rocks and cliffs, melting permafrost, dying trees due overheating and shortages of water, etc.? Yet, the Swiss pragmatism is an inherent characteristic driving the sense of business and overcome in a first phase the shortcomings of actions of long-term visions. The question about the importance of alpine Switzerland for the Swiss identity will be subject to the very Swiss-pragmatism 'doing business' first. Tourism as a key revenue too important for Switzerland will be reinvented.

My visual studies show the Swiss alpine landscape in flashy and colorful splashes with rough black brush strokes, sketch-like outlining hills, mountains, horizons - referring at once to the emerging modernism & structuralism in the 1930's (Swiss tourism posters) and pop-art of the sixties. The landscapes are reduced to mere imagery & imagination. The Alpine Switzerland is mutating into an dreamlike abstraction for the sake of continuous profit driven consumption, wiping off concerns of loss of homeland.