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 first as an assistant in art school, then as as a teacher, again at HEAD, and was also part-time image editor for the City of Geneva. During a 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 of modern consciousness (Face You, Projection, C'est du Trois) of the Global North.

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 (see video Pierre).

The results are a body of work: videos, a series of photographs, objects and archival installations. In the exhibitions, she invites esoteric practices of aura photography calling it "after benjamin" refering to Walter Benjamins' Aura  in order to wake-up its public, provoke an ideological clash of cultures.

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 engages in artistic/scientific research in order to deepen her work/reserach related to the question of the modern consciousness at work in Global North, 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. She starts with interrogating her work tool of her past art which brought her into the arts, the photo and video camera, leading to a research work. Based on initial postcolonial research with a focus on gender and racism issues in relation to photography (global industrialization and colonization through a cultural practice using the example of Kodak), the following ontological questions have emerged through her decolonial research process: What modern consciousness of reality is at work in the medium, technology and process of photography? The focus changed therefore on organic relationships, no longer on technology, especially the relationships between non-humans, animals and plants, both in the global North and the global South. 
 

In addition to approaches from the global South, she refers to two theoretical approaches: Philippe Descola and his analysis of naturalism and Arturo Escobar's political ontology and the idea of pluriversality. Therefore, a second, collaborative and practical part, a so-called pluriversal project is starting in 2024, focusing on the process and the “how”. It discusses the (relational) ontology and epistemology of post-'representation' or 'post-representationism' or other representational epistemologies and epistemes - of the world, of the cosmos, of "worlding", by asking what it means to have a so-called "earth-connected" approach in a joint approach between the Global North and the Global South that meets the current challenges of climate change.

The following works were created between 2017 and 2024 reflecting the stages of the work/reserach process Dorothée has gone through in her 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.