Glarus Scraping Ball, 2014 (video excerpt)

Glarus Scraping Ball

24 May – 14 September 2014
Kunsthaus Glarus and Klöntal Valley, Switzerland

“Glarus Scraping Ball”
Performance and Installation with Video (color, sound, 11:14 min)

The performative sculpture "Glarus Scraping Ball" (2014) combines botany, geology, traditional myths, an old recipe for a Glarus tea, and locally rooted art history. On walks, for example with botanical experts, visitors are transformed into actors: somewhere along the way between Bödmerenwald and Kunsthaus Glarus, they come across a permeable metal mesh ball and are invited to start it rolling with a little push, moving it on their way through a stretch of landscape marked with signs. Thus, in the search for ingredients for a Glarus tea recipe from the eighteenth century, it rolls through many layers of civilization, witnessing numerous things along the way: flowers, earth, stones, and roots. Christian Philipp Müller is also producing a talisman, titled "Vreneli’s Talisman" (2014), which is filled with the dried root of the Devil’s bit — one of the ingredients of the tea recipe — and also references the legend of Vrenelisgärtli in the Glärnisch mountains in which a headstrong young woman seeks to start a garden in an almost impossible to reach spot, losing her life in the process. Both curators wear this talisman during the Klöntal Triennale in a kind of performative action, thereby communicating to the world the protective effect, according to tradition, of the Glarus root.