Biography long version

Dorothée Elisa Baumann began her artistic training in 2002, at the age of 29, at the École de Photographie de Vevey (Formation Supérieure CEPV) in Switzerland. She continued her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Genève, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts, first in new media photography-video, then, as an interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary artist, a Master in contemporary art practice (WorkMaster, HEAD) at the Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD). During this phase, Dorothée also worked as an assistant, then as a freelance photography teacher, again at HEAD, and was a part-time image editor for the City of Geneva. During this first creative phase as an art student (2002 to 2012), Dorothée experimented with the photographic medium and became interested in questions of perception and ethics (Face You, Projection, C'est du Trois). This was followed by Pleasure Arousal Dominance, a first interdisciplinary project between 2009 and 2012: over a three-year period, she attended a basic research center in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Geneva. Dorothée acts as an amateur, using laboratory rooms as backdrops and high-tech equipment as attributes of her images, and playfully collaborates in her short collaborative videos with the center's physicist as the main character. The results are videos, a series of photographs, objects and archival installations. In the exhibitions, she invites esoteric practices of aura photography and media sessions to provoke an ideological clash of cultures, thereby also establishing a new form of interdisciplinarity that hardly takes place in realpolitik. The project was presented in a first solo exhibition in 2012, Centre de la Photographie Genève, and a monograph Éditions Centre de la Photographie/Les presses du réel (2017) was published, Dorothée received the Prix de la Critique at Arles (2013) for this project.

As of 2017, Dorothée's main focus is on artistic and scientific research, and she is preparing a thesis in social anthropology at the University of Bern, under the supervision of Professor Tobias Haller, which she will complete in 2025. A first phase interrogates the central tool of her past practice, the photo and video camera, leading to a profound reflection on her own cultural perception, particularly with regard to the photographic perspective as a colonial understanding of space-time, as well as the question of her own perception of the body and her artistic practice in dialogue with First Nations culture in the USA. In the course of this research, she develops a new focus on culture-nature ontological discussion and environmental issues, where More Than Human and the dream as common space become central.

The following works were created between 2017 and 2023 reflecting the stages of the process Dorothée has gone through in recent years: Video Take A Better Picture, Framing, Blow-Up-Job, Remix, 2Hrs, 19Min, 19Sec, 9 Frames, Erutan, Glacier Landscape, Terra Madre, Time Circle, Ancient Future, Wind Poems, Aura, Art work with a tree, Martin's work my father, Tanz im Nerz mit den Bären, Diving, Climbing the Walls of Modernity.