Biography résumé
December 2022
 
Dorothée Elisa Baumann (aka Do) began her artistic training in 2002 at the School of Fine Arts and Photography in Vevey, Switzerland. She continued her studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Geneva, starting with a Master's in Public Space in 2012 and later graduating with a Master's in Contemporary Art Practice (WorkMaster, HEAD) with distinction in 2012. Her first long-term artistic project explored knowledge production through in situ artworks and interdisciplinary holistic methods over three years in a center for basic research in cognitive neuroscience in Geneva (Pleasure Arousal Dominance). She transformed the exhibition space into what she calls a "resonant space" where she juxtaposes popular practices of the spiritualism movement and practices of expanded consciousness with the hard sciences: two ontologies interacting in the same exhibition. Her project was awarded the international critic's prize Voix Off Arles France. Pleasure Arousal Dominance's first solo exhibition was held at CPG Centre de la photographie Genève in 2012. Her first monograph was published by Editions Centre de la Photographie in 2017.
Baumann's next projects from 2016 were Take A Better Picture and her art manifesto of the same name. The works from this phase were further shown in a solo exhibition in 2018 (Centre Pasquart) and later at Lokal Juraplatz, Noorderlicht Festival, CPG, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and The Photographers' Gallery. This was followed by a parallel engagement as an artist in the context of artistic research at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bern, where she works at the Institute of Social Anthropology. One of her main focuses today is the current culture-nature divide within her culture and currently an engagement with the First Nation Community (AICH American Community House, New York City) where she will carry out a project in the area of reconciliation together with the AICH starting in 2023. In the last years, several works have been created: Time Circle (2022), Wind poems (2022), Erutan (2020), Ancient Future (2020), and Re-Balancing (2018).