Kotoaki Asano (*1972) is a Japanese artist, architect, designer and poet. His multifaceted practice is rooted in Japanese traditions, which are conceptually developed to make the world around us consciously and sensitively perceptible through elements of architecture. Asano creates spaces that are in dialog with their surroundings, giving them a poetic dimension.

His works have already been shown at a number of biennials, including the Lucca Biennale OFF 2021 in Italy, the Larnaca Biennale 2021 in Cyprus, the Art Ii Biennale 2022 in Finland, the Artspace Bremerhaven 2023 in Germany and the L’AND ART 23 / 5a. Biennal Internacional d’Andorra in Andorra. Among others, he received the American Architecture Master Prize in 2019, the Korean K-Design Award 2020 Grand Prize and most recently won the ICONIC AWARDS 2021 in Germany.

Inspired by the theme “Garden and Architecture”, as well as the beautiful location of the Biennale Bregaglia 2024, Kotoaki Asano created three wind pavilions that capture the ever-changing interplay of light and wind in Bondo. Their placement allows these works to exist within the entirety of the landscape, in this way drawing awareness to the contrast between the village scenery in the foreground, the small natural scenery around the village, as well as the mountain landscape in the distance.

Wind Pavillon A, B and C

2024
A Steel wires
B Threads, wood frames
C Cotton, nylon net, wood

Exhibition site

Lisa Collomb (*1984) is a transdisciplinary Irish-Swiss artist working in Chur. Her artistic practice is concerned with the documentation and representation of the natural and built environment. Through the intricate manipulation of environmental reality captures, the artist unveils a space that intertwines the digital and analogue spheres.

Her work is characterized by a lasting connection to place and was shown in 2022 at the group exhibition of the Alps Art Academy in Tenna and in 2021 at her solo exhibition Pointclouds of the Alpine City in the Stadtgalerie of Chur.

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024 offered her an opportunity to create a site-specific work which combined her interests in architecture and ecology, and to present this in a place that has special meaning to the artist.

With A world between the lines, Collomb created an other-worldly space in Bondo, where she chose the Crotti to show her installation. As a natural cooling system, and an architectural representation of the natural world working together with the built environment, the Crotti provided the logical home for her project which, in the same way, explores the symbiosis of plants and architecture.

A world between the lines can be seen as an illusionary light sculpture that challenges the perception of the viewer. It uses the medium of point cloud to represent the "space in-between” in a way referencing the project title.

A world between the lines

2024
Pointcloud print on Acrylic Plates
10 parts

Exhibition site

Athene Galiciadis (*1978) is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. Her oeuvre ranges from sculpture and paintings to installations that always enter into a dialogue with space. This can be both physical space and mental interstices created by geometric and organic-looking motifs and a colourful palette.

Athene Galiciadis had two major solo exhibitions – Orientation at Museum Haus Konstruktiv (Zürich 2023) and Measuring the World at gallery von Bartha (Copenhagen 2023) – which led to an article about her work in the 236th issue of Frieze magazine. In 2022, the artist also received the Foundation for Graphic Art in Switzerland's sponsorship award.

For some time now, Athene Galiciadis has been interested in the makeshift shelters created by humans, which give rise to structures that express security, order and hierarchy. For BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024, Galiciadis developed such a structure, a kind of shelter that also embodies an artwork-as-laboratory. The ‘Shelter’, which was specially developed for Bondo and also serves as a greenhouse for tomatoes, enables an examination of ecological and economic issues. Galiciadis dedicates it to the people of Bondo, the snails, the birds and other garden animals. The interplay between artificial interventions in the environment and life according to the rules of nature at the same time emphasises the exceptional location of Bondo, where nature represents both a habitat and a threat.

Nachtwache ich

2024
acrylic, sheeting, hazelnut, string, tomato plants, parsley plants, basil plants, soil

Exhibition site

Georg Gatsas (*1978) is an artist and photographer. For his photographs – mostly portraits of key figures in contemporary music scenes and club culture – he goes right to the center of events. He focuses on socio-cultural processes and meets social visions of freedom, diversity, solidarity and individual lifestyles.  His view through the lens of the camera serves him as an instrument of communication and, not least, research.

In search of moments of collective experience, Gatsas is often out and about at night in the streets, clubs and dance floors. However, the subject matter of his photographs goes beyond the immediate context of music. It deals with identities characterized by migration and global networking. In this sense, Gatsas sees himself as part of an intercultural dialogue.

Georg Gatsas was awarded the Swiss Federal Prize for Art (2007) and the Manor Art Prize St. Gallen (2017).

Themes of nature and climate change as well as their visual representation are increasingly finding their way into the more recent productions of the musicians with whom Georg Gatsas collaborates. For some time now, the artist has been looking for a way to focus his camera on the phenomena of nature. For the BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024, Gatsas now took the opportunity to depict the partially unspoiled nature with its various tree species in Val Bregaglia.

Alberi

2024
Textile print on cotton
8 parts

Exhibition site

Marcel Herbst (*1938) is a social scientist, essayist and photographer. Photography has accompanied him almost his entire life. He has worked analogue and, since 1980, almost exclusively with large-format negatives. His primary themes are vernacular (local) architecture, landscapes and the visual evidence of a vanished Eastern Jewish culture.

As part of his socio-economic research, Marcel Herbst also documented remote parts of the world photographically, for example in Nigeria, Senegal, Mauritania, Tanzania, Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. His photographs have been included in the collection of the Fotostiftung Schweiz Winterthur. He showed his pictures as part of an exhibition at BINZ39 (Zurich 2023), which was dedicated to Jewish themes.

The photographer found his way to Bergell and its granite when he returned to Switzerland (1974) and over the decades (from 1982 onwards) and climbed many pitches (in the Albigna and Val Bondasca). At the BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024, Marcel Herbst will be showing photographic impressions of Bondo over the course of time.

Senza titolo

1982-2024/2024
C-Print on paper
18 parts

Exhibition site

Piero Maspoli (*1949) is a Swiss sculptor who works preferably with natural stone, more precisely with granite and sandstone. Both rocks refer to a larger context: the granite crystallized from the primordial mass, while the sandstone formed by sedimentation bears fossil imprints. Interested in the tension of opposites, the artist favors the juxtaposition of his sculptures with contemporary architecture.

Piero Maspoli is a founding member of the Gaswerk AZB in Schlieren. The artist has also been awarded an artist residency in Cairo and Beirut in collaboration with Hussam Bokeili (2021-2022).

For Piero Maspoli, Bondo represents many things at once, because people are just as present here as nature. Together they interact and are in a (still) never-ending dialogue. For the BIENNALE BREAGAGLIA 2024, the artist has placed a chimney cap, a familiar element from the village landscape, on a plinth between the mountain massif and a bridge. The archaic figure not only refers to the cycle of the material in the conflict between human hands and nature, but also calls for mankind to recognize the overwhelming power of the mountain.

Granito

2024
Gneis from Piz Cengalo
5 parts

Exhibition site

Juliana Rios Martinez (*1988) is a Colombian painter and visual artist. She has always tried to be part of the places she was working at, connecting with her surroundings and the people around her. Her work is driven by questions of identity, community, and the importance of color in our everyday lives.

Rios Martinez has already received several grants and residencies, including the artistic residency of the Quebec Council of Arts and Letters (Canada 2015), as well as the Arts in Residence grant in Esbeek (Netherlands 2019). She was the Spotlights Open Call winner of the Amalgama/Barcú Foundation (London 2021). Most recently, her works were shown as part of the group exhibition Opposing Fictions: Women provoking fact and fabrication at Piccadilly Circus’ Koppel X (London 2022).

With her participation in the BIENNALE BREGALIA 2024, Juliana Rios Martinez is taking her artistic work beyond the borders of her home country and making it part of the artistic heritage of another community. Having just rebuilt the home of her grandmother in Villanueva (La Guajira), she has experienced the meaning of rebuilding a home and finding a different sense of time in a rural town. Bondo is still healing and rebuilding after the avalanche of 2017. With her work and the subsequent color, she is bringing to Bondo through the Biennale the artist wants to help rebuild and honor its history.

Jardín de los Alpes tropicales

2024
Natural pigments, lime, salt and sand

Exhibition site

Lea Schaffner (*1989) is a Swiss video artist whose work deals with cultural, social and historical narratives and the telling of stories. In her installations, she picks up on locally or historically based circumstances, which she develops into her own narratives. Her works pose questions about the way history was and is written and which forms of remembrance can challenge established orders.

Lea Schaffner's works were shown as part of her solo exhibition Aus dem Kopf, From the Head (by heart) at sic! Elphanthouse (Luzern 2022). She took part in the group exhibition next generation at Trudelhaus (Baden 2023) and showed her latest work in the exhibition relatives with Philip Ullrich at Kabinett Visarte (Zürich 2024).

Attracted by the location of the BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024, Lea Schaffner continues her ongoing project of «Eigenwillige Archive» in Bondo. Inspired by Sara Ahmed's concept of the «Willfulness Archive» she is researching ways of expanding the conventional archive and questioning structures of memory. In Bondo, the artist set out in search of the buildings that have disappeared since the landslide (2017). In the process, it became clear that it is difficult to remember at the present time; the «Willfulness Archive of Bondo» therefore revolves around a barely tangible present, visiting and remembering a future.

Special thanks to: Elvira Salis-Ganzoni, Caroline Hepting, Johanna Kotlaris and Inga Müller.

Besuchen gehen

2024
Color video
21 min, DE/IT/EN, loop

Exhibition site

Ines Marita Schärer (*1987) works in the fields of poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She deals with the precarious conditions, vulnerability and sensitivity of different beings within prevailing power structures and explores the voice and words as a means of creating relationality and speculating and re-imagining their conditions and environments.

She has been awarded residencies at Forum For Radical Ecology Study FO.R.E.ST (Estonia), MORPHO, Development Residency (Antwerp 2023) and participated in group exhibitions at Stadtgalerie (Bern), Kunsthaus Langenthal, Z33 (Hasselt) and various projects in public space.

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024 offered Schärer an opportunity to approach the Bergell valley, which has fascinated her since childhood, in a new way through exchange and dialogue on site. Stations of her sound installation can be found at various locations. Once whispered, then spoken or sung, voices resound, following the wind through the valley. The artist counters the hard stone with the voice and its peculiarity as a soothing, calming agent. Through the gentle encouragement of the voice, a direct confrontation with the present takes place, which counteracts the past and the associated brutality of the landslide. A focus is posed on the story The Bees of Plurs by the writer and strong personality of the valley Silvia Andrea (1840-1935) and on the sensitivity of the bees which she addressed in her text.

Voice: 
- Cinzia Rogantini
- Ines Marita Schärer

Accordion:
- Suzan Peeters

The Bees of Plurs by the writer Silvia Andrea (1840-1935), reinterpreted by the 4th-6th classes of Maloja primary school. Listen to it here.

Sorèl sussurra

2024
Sound Installation
7 parts in Bondo

Exhibition site

Jonathan Steiger (*1997) is a transdisciplinary Swiss artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. In his work, he explores the diverse connections between landscape, aesthetics and architecture. His work focusses on situations in which man-made environments and processes suddenly coincide with natural ones. One of Steiger’s central interests lies in how established perceptions of places and landscapes have an effect on physical space.

Jonathan Steiger studied spatial practice at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and fine art at the Zurich University of the Arts. He was a fellow of the European architecture platform LINA (2023).

His “Baumoräne” created for BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2024 is based on the close connection between Bondo's architecture and the surrounding landscape. It consists of stones that were stored unused in the village and that the artist borrowed from its inhabitants. The body and material of the work illustrate the extent to which the mountains and the terrain are not static but in constant motion; on the other hand, they also tell the story of the surrounding architecture, which consists of a natural material that can be reused endlessly. After the Biennale, the stones will be returned to their original owners or taken back to their original location.

Baumoräne

2024
Stones, Paraloid B-72, Indian ink, poster

Exhibition site