This project was developed during an artist residency with Gästeatelier Krone in Aarau, Switzerland, 2020.
In “Whole chunks of time are casually lost somewhere” Barmelweid Clinic becomes a place where I project my thoughts on “safe bubbles”. A term that I ascribe to global spaces of professional hospitality. I’ve always been interested in finding these spaces and investigating their effect on someone’s mental state and sense of time, how the familiarity of these places can offer a sense -even if it was an illusion- of safety, and how it evokes mixed feelings of comfort and anxiety.
My interest in Barmelweid stems from it being a multifaceted site that combines a lot of the themes that I follow. It’s a sterile place where you can be looked after physically and mentally, and it also has an element of professional hospitality, you can book a guest room, eat in a public restaurant with a breathtaking view, watch cute animals in the clinic’s park, or go on a hike following the well-defined hiking trails.
My residency in Aarau coincided with the Covid-19 outbreak, I had to find alternative methods to access Barmelweid. One method was acquiring postcards sent by patients who stayed in Barmelweid from 1912 to the 1980s, then having these cards translated in an attempt to understand what the patients experienced and aimed to convey through such a short text and to look for ordinary sentences that might be relatable. The other method was a digital one, where I would visit the weather webcam page of the clinic every day during the lockdown and download several images from there at different times of the day. I must mention that at a later time of the residency the people of Barmelweid were very kind to receive me as their guest for a week, where I was served a daily dinner that came with a green napkin.
Photos from the exhibition at Forum Schlossplatz in Aarau, June 2020
photos credit: Peter Koehl