Biography


Dorothée Elisa Baumann began her artistic training in 2002 at the Formation supérieure de la Photographie in Vevey, Switzerland. She then continued her studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where she worked for three years as an assistant and then for seven years as a freelance lecturer in artistic photography at the HEAD. In 2012, she began a Master's in Public Space in Sierre under the direction of Christophe Kihm. She then switched to the Master in Contemporary Art Practice in Geneva under the direction of Laurent Schmidt (WorkMaster, HEAD), as the Master in Sierre (VD) was closed. In addition to her commitment to art with a focus on interdisciplinary issues, Dorothée Elisa Baumann was a picture editor for the city of Geneva. In addition to her involvement in art with a focus on interdisciplinary issues, Dorothée Elisa Baumann was head picture editor for the city of Geneva, where she built up the city's overarching picture editorial department together with a colleague and was also responsible for the shared artistic direction of the public art project Vis-A-Vis, a joint project with the Geneva Cultural Office. Initially interested in issues of public space and archival practices in arts, Dorothée turned to interdisciplinarity and research explored human perception and the body. She mixed her master's project HEAD (2011) artworks in situ and interdisciplinary methods in a center for basic research in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Geneva with emic, tabooed pagan practices such as aura reading (Pleasure Arousal Dominance (2011), with a solo exhibition at the Centre de la Photographie Genève (2012) and a monograph published by Les Presses du réel (2017).

 

Since 2017, she has been involved in an artistic-scientific and ethnographic research project (Unlearning for the Commons) that addresses the question of the relationship to nature in the ontological debate on climate issues and terracide and is accompanied by complex questions about decolonizing practices of research and the arts, challenging the question of indignity in her own culture.