Suzanne Bernhardt

New light entering the house in unexpected places, shimmering through the old glass and reflecting on the walls, saying, I’m here, I’m showing you, the house unfolding from winter to spring. We follow the light, the shadow, moving between the inside and outside, we move chairs, tables, we move plants, we plant trees, trying to move with the place. With each visitor we again find new perspectives, new corners, new enterings, with each visitor, the house inhales new ideas, and exhales old ones. We take in all, let them sit with us, stirred up like muddy water. It feels messy, and cozy. It feels scary and soft. We left the house to travel for our moving practice, with a promise to return and care for it, to keep following the light and its shadows, and allow the house to see our lighter and darker sides too, a place to unfold ourselves together 🐚🐚🐚

After a season of dormancy, we returned to fruittrees in the Alpe Adria region. This year we are looking into pears, a fruit that has been returning to us over the last years, popping up in breakfast buffets, drinks and many conversations about the shelflife of fruits. We even got a pear tree in our new garden! We discovered pears as a alpine fruit, returning high altitude meadows, orchards and gardens. We found traces of pears in architecture, in drying chambers and storage rooms. Visiting villages with fruittree cultivation showed us how seasons have been slowly leaving our yearly working rhythms, and finding place for pears dropping, picking, preparing, becomes less and less possible, as it was always a collective act. How do we return to seasons to make space for old varieties of fruits, how can we collectively carve out time in our ever accelerating lifestyles? Can we pause with pears? We are collecting stories crossing borders in the Alpe Adria Region and turning them into a small living archive, that is shared in the longest day of the year in an orchard in Austria close to the Slovene border big thanks to our @vidarucli and @aljazskrlep who help us give order to this cross border web of stories! This project is supported by @unikumkulturnicenter curated by Alina Zeigen

Perceiving pre-spring in the house, first blossoms while uncovering the overgrown garden that emerged below the snow. Below browned grasses and other plants, I find tiny seedlings reaching for the sun. And inside, the walls of the house start to feel softer. Tymon came over to measure them, understanding the past of the house, its logics, its traces of building techniques no longer used, as well as finding new ways to relate to these walls, slowly! One of the most rewarding feelings is having guests over. I think to receive others, share a space, a meal, a moment between the walls, is what makes us feel at home most! It’s feels like the house breathes with every visitor, making us observe new things, or have other perspectives, making it bigger and smaller at the same time, making us dream and ground. It reminds us to be guests ourselves and listen what the house has to tell us, what the garden shows us, and how the walls make us feel! My dream for this house is that it breathes: people, stories, flowers, textiles, meals, whispers, tears, smiles, the smell of roasting corn flour, things flourishing, things withering, all from those thick walls, inside and outside, making them tasty and making all those want to return!

Bolzano had some sweet vibes, even reminding me of Amsterdam somehow, lots of water, people on bikes, a bit messy in some ways, as well as lots of sweet initiatives sprouting. We spend these days amongst old friends and new and exiting ones forming. Departing from grasslands connected us to farmers, sheeps, landscape ecologists, anthropologists, artists, food and science faculties, talking about new myths of forests eating villages, dogs that are feared more than wolves, traditional building of fences and other thresholds, seasonal work and digestion time guided by new microbiomes. Who’s guesting and hosting the forest and meadow ecotone? What’s our place in it, can we taste it, touch it, hold it, rest within? Being with, and staying with the ecotone in Ashbach this summer, we’ll be hosting guesting rituals around the bordering forest and grasland landscapes, find ways to understand the frictions and fictions that linger here within the threshold. A big thank you to all the generous meetings with people and places sharing their stories with us over the last week. We’re looking forward to return this summer! 🌀 The residency is part of the two-year project Pastoral Twilight: Initiatives for Rural Cultures, developed by @bau_southtyrol with ARE: @les__woods (Czech Republic) and @verpejos (Lithuania) and funded by the European Union.

We returned to the most northern part of Friesland to work with wool under the guidance of Tineke and her company Wadnwol. This time we visited a sheepfarmer, talking about soil health in relation to animal well being and its effects on the quality of the wool. Because as Tineke always says, not all needs to be saved, or at least, not all wool should be proccesed by her and the machines she has. If the wool has too much seeds, pieces of landscape or dung clinging to it, then the cleaning procces takes too long, or if not cleaned well, the machines get clogged. It is therefore really important to time the sheep shaving well, and to discuss with the sheep shaver what parts to keep apart for wool production and what parts can be not used for yarn & felt production. Belly wool and short neck fibers are sorted out, and we return with lanolin shiny wool that is washed twice with a bit soda. The wool is then dried and ‘picked’ a pre-proccesing of untangling, where most of the still clinging seeds and plant pieces fall out. We sit on the picker, and feed small parts of washed wool through the mouth filled with sharp needles, on the others side small clouds fly out. These clouds are then weighted out and fed into the fleecing making machine, turning the pieces into one big fluffy roll of combed fibers. These rolls are the base for our felted pieces. We combine diffrent natural colors to create patterns and contrasts, much like the surrounding grazinglands. In this first working period we learned how essential working with the carding machine is. It is where the design proces starts, creating color combinations and playing with thickness and widths, we look forward to return and spend time with the carding machine and explore its possibilities! Thanks to @mondriaanfonds for this opportunity to collaborate with @tinekewadn ☁️☁️☁️

I’m happy to share that I’ve received a Voucher Artisan from MondriaanFonds to further develop my knowledge of traditional wool processing in collaboration with Tineke van der Zweep. Over the past year, we began working with wool in a project centered on grazing and landscape, which sparked a deeper investigation into the relationship between landscape, animal, material and movement. Both @kolmannphilipp and I fell in love with the material, its textures, its smell, its way of transforming by carding and felting. It feels like something that was always there, like an embodied memory slowly waking up! With our practice as a nomadic food studio, we worked with different grazers, like cows, goat and sheep that have shown us ways to move, transform and store the landscape through eating and leaving behind edibles. With this work we store these landscape and their stories into textile surfaces. Surfaces that breathe, collect seeds, protect and become a soft border between the inside and the outside. During an 8-week intensive trajectory, we will work closely with Tineke to learn the full wool-processing chain, from raw fleece preparation, picking and carding, to felting. Alongside technical skills and machine maintenance, we will explore different wool types and their properties, building on earlier experiments that combine historical carding machines with contemporary needle felting. Thanks a lot to @mondriaanfonds and @tinekewadn for this collaboration ☁️☁️☁️

Soft beginnings in a new, old place, since the beginning of this year we are making fires in different rooms of a beautiful old farm house in the Austrian countryside bordering Italy. A little over a year ago we first visited this place, and now we are slowly imagining to make our home here. The walls are thick, the floorboards are wide, the rooms are small, it’s a house build of stone from the surroundings. In the last years we have been busy with the question how to live with a place, how does it feed us, how do we feed it? While moving between different geographies, cultures and localities, this place feels like the right place to continue to unpack how to live in entanglement, how to slow down, how to root. The coldest month of the year invites us live in the smaller rooms of the house that can easily be warmed. While the hills and forest invites us into the wide and open. We are moving like a breath, between the inside and the outside, slowly adjusting to a new rhythm, a new place. While chopping wood, making fires, simmering stews, burning candles, we look forward to days getting longer, walls getting warmer, to host others, while being a guest in this over a hundred years old structure.

Visiting different wool facilities in Austria in the last weeks, learning about knitting and weaving, about washing and boiling, about pounding and brushing. We visited two loden facilities that showed us how boiled wool was made for over 500 years, how some things have been replaced and renewed, while other details always stayed the same. Especially touched by the *kaardebollen* that are fixed in a massive machine, that are softly brushing the boiled wool, giving it a gentle touch. We also visited a wool facility in Tirol that has a whole building dedicated to washing wool. One of the biggest challenges in establishing value of wool fibers, is that sheep’s wool is the perfect carrier of seeds, pieces of plants, dust and dung. Washing wool costs time, lots of water, and energy for drying. This facility invested in the wool washing machines, because they believe in utilizing local wool. When we visited the washing building, it was currently not running, because it’s too cold and the drying proces would cost too much energy. Seasonal machine use, made the employees focus on producing fleece and yarn, while later in the year, washing will happen again. The wool comes from different local sheep breeds, that spend lots of time outside, and have beautiful patched wool. In the coming year, we will continue to learn about these animals, their fibers, their landscapes, their seasonal movements. 🐏🐏🐏 Visits: Lodenwalker 1434 Lodenmanufactur Steiner 1888 Ötztaler Schafwollzentrum

A little bit of summer heat in the coldest time of the year! The most heartwarming project of last year, came through an invitation of our friends to cook for their wedding, taking place on top of a hill in Liguria, Italy with hardly any infrastructure, energy or water! We went for a location scouting and were bathed in the beautiful landscape, amazing foods from the surroundings and by the great hosts they are! We came up with a menu balanced between the sea and the hill, between the tarraces and the kitchen, between tents and a cooling truck. We are unbelievably impressed with @tymonhogenelst and @vibekevanderbilt - who managed to move mountains! Together with the great help of our team *Uncommon Wedding* Vida, Ele & Dora, we served many celebratory moments, walked many many steps and tasted the landscape together. Our menu: ♥️ swordfish ceviche with fried capers, pickled chili and sun-dried tomato oil served with a salted tomato sorbetto ♥️ mussels, clams and bean brodo topped with less than a minute grilled seabass ♥️ figleaf pannacotta with olive oil from the land ♥️ home made limoncello by Tym and Vib / shared plates with whipped mascapone, grilled figs & yellow plums, dripped with bayleaf syrup ♥️ thank you to invite us to be part of this wild adventure, we look forward cooking these dishes again sometime next summer and celebrating time spend in the most crazy heat and love and bumpy roads leading to a feast to never forget! ♥️♥️♥️

Building down, Amino, Anima, Umami, is looking at many sweet moments together, @kolmannphilipp and I started to work with wool for the first time this summer, and fell in love with the proces of dryfelting and with the workshop of @tinekewadn -We connected not only over the material but also over the relation with the land, grazing animals and soil types and home baked bread. This leads us to further explore this relation in the coming year! 🌀Also, we were exited to work again with @morlokgrislis - we love how the vessels got their own spirit through the waterlocking system in combination with the handbuilding and wheel turning details. The glazes are a combination of slip and ashes and the lids are designed to be used as serving plates, once the fermentation is done🌀 The grass pin’s by @juliabocanet are just falling into place, as if she has picked up a leaf and folded it into shape. It has actually been carefully carved out of wax before being casted in bronze and oxidized to create a shadow-like patina🌀Returning to @rest_earth in fall and winter, in a way feels like the land takes more place in the winter. Maybe because we are less taking part in it, and more looking at the surroundings from the inside, time for reflection and rest. From the first moment we arrived at Saskia and Arnout, we were offered a slow down, and now our vessels with their bellies filled at taking it slow at the farm, spending the winter outside fermenting🌀 Preparing over 500 cookies with the help of dear @sashavanaalst , who is never afraid to think big and think small! Being with the proces and welcoming the unexpected with such gentleness! 🌀Immensely thankful for all the time spend together with the people that made this work possible. I love how the objects that come out of these collaborations, invite coming together. We are looking forward how those gatherings will unfold in the coming year 🌀 many thanks also to team @vhdg.kunst for inviting us the become dwellers of the Frisian Landscape.

Some moments of fruits celebration, of anticipation, of rest, of learning, of observing change. In the last year we researched fruittree culture for the Uncommon Fruits project together with our friends of @r_o_b_i_d_a / we departed from the Forest, the wild, uncultivated - where fruit reach out of our limit. Then we moved to the Village - when tradition of collection and cultivation begins, when memories and cabinets are filled with flavors of the fruits in the villages and herbs from its borders. We stepped into the Valley where the hills filled with vines received us to pick ripe grapes and learn about the decades of wine cultivation, shaping its hills into woven carpets of ancient rootvines with grafted new varieties. The three terroirs: the Forrest, the Village, the Valley, allowed us to get to know this region from a different perspective, becoming a guest on these diffrent lands, we wanted to offer the tastes and tales of those places. So we captured them in drinks and bites to celebrate old and new friendships surrounding the fruits in these terroirs! This weekend we are in Topolo to host with flavors captured in those places and it would be great to see you at the presentation of @r_o_b_i_d_a magazine/ and at the workshop on fruit dumplings this Sunday in Topolo together with Nonna Maria Gilda 🧺 🧺🧺

This summer @kolmannphilipp and I spend some time together with Tineke and her sheep to work of a series of blankets. We collected wool of sheep that grazed on different soil types in Friesland: sand, peat and clay. You can feel in the fibers on with soil the sheep have grazed, Tineke can! We work with an historic carding and fleece machine, coming from Romania that Tineke and Stytse are caring for. The machines need a lot of maintenance and care, it beautifull to see how you become one with those machines, working with them slows you down and speeds you up. We finalized the pieces with a more modern needle felting machine, when we combined hand needlework for details and machine work to melt them into one piece. The pieces resemble the parceled landscapes we visited this summer, with wilder edges, inviting to come closer. You can see them now @vhdg.kunst where our exhibition: Amino, Anima, Umami - is on view till half over December 🌀 the working with wool, was a exiting new step in our practice, and we hope to continue exploring those wool surfaces! A big big thank you to @tinekewadn for your knowledge, and hospitality during our stay!