Over the past ten years, Katalin Deér has repeatedly spent time in the Val Bregaglia and taken photographs there. The result is an extensive collection of snapshots of different buildings and their unique presence in a landscape that is continuously moved and shaped by time and the forces of nature. The photos taken with an analogue camera appear in dense groups of two, four, eight, or nine pictures per page. Flat, green enameled copper plates, printed to the edge on both sides, continually interrupt the flow of the pages. In its surface and depth, the glassy, frozen surface created during the melting and cooling of the enameled plates is strangely similar to analogue photographic paper, and at the same time a snapshot that becomes what it is through an action. Like the photographic prints, the plates for the book were laid out and scanned directly. Inspired by the combination of the pictures (often repeated ones of the same buildings), the result is a complex and at the same time temporal interweaving and narrative: not an enumeration of architecture, but an emphatic view that focuses on things and turns to them, a tightrope walk. The book concludes with a text collage resulting from a conversation with Stephan Kunz on artistic questions in this process.

This publication was made possible with the generous support of Gemeinde Bergell, Boner Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, SWISSLOS/Kulturförderung, Kanton Graubünden, Kanton St.Gallen and Stadt St.Gallen.