"Walking in Nature"

Ester Vonplon (*1980 in Schlieren) is one of a nationally and internationally acclaimed younger generation of artists whose work deals pointedly with the issues of climate change and sustainability. She has developed a current work for the foyer of the KKL Luzern during Lucerne Festival 2023.

Whether on her travels to the Arctic, on her hikes through the last unspoiled Swiss high valleys, in her video and photographic work Gletscherfahrt (a collaboration with Stephan Eicher), or in her haunting project I See Darkness, for which she moved her studio to the disused Acla tunnel in the Safiental: Vonplon is interested in how we as individuals and as a society deal with nature. Therefore, looking at one of her works always means giving free rein to one’s thoughts on how we want to live in the future and what new paths we must take to realize sustainable visions.

This year’s motto of the Summer Festival is Paradise: Under the title Walking in Nature, Vonplon focuses on how we can protect our paradise on earth – the nature – in the long term. For the KKL foyer during the festival, she is creating three large-format forest images as wallpaper and on fabric panels from the area around Castrisch in Graubünden, where the artist lives and works.

The motifs themselves are actually unspectacular. They show a seemingly untouched nature. The fact that this impression is deceptive because our forests are suffering greatly from climate change and environmental pollution is only not clear here at first glance. Vonplon uses this year’s motto of the Lucerne Festival as a resonance space for sustainability: it has become part of our collective consciousness that paradisiacal conditions have not prevailed in nature for a long time and that it is humankind who – figuratively speaking – constantly helps himself to „forbidden fruit.“

Her works developed for Lucerne Festival are typical of Vonplon’s way of working: the artist does not want to admonish or instruct. Instead, with her photographs, installations, and video works, she wants to draw our attention to the beauty of nature and thus to the importance of our long-term responsibility for our environment, for nature, and for our planet.

For the opening of the Summer Festival, Ester Vonplon also showed a video work in the Lucerne Hall. She took the viewer to the Arctic and Graubünden with atmospherically dense images. She took us on a melancholy journey that made us realize: Climate change is not only in the Arctic but everywhere.

Dorothea Strauss