Käsesyndikat

The project "Käsesyndikat" invites Alcova’s audience to join an experiment of negotiating the value of cheese brought from the Swiss Alps. Through a dialogue-based process at the counter of a small kiosk, visitors not only purchase cheese but also engage with the social fabric that enabled its journey from the farmer to Alcova. While packaging the cheese themselves and listening to stories from the place where it is produced, they create their own narrative strands. With a timer built into the installation, the question arises, which parameters determine its value - the longer they stay, the cheaper the cheese. 

The project is rooted in research on an alpine farming system in the Alpine village Guttannen and its transformation resulting from the arrival of the hydropower industry in the region. It centers around the cheese produced by a cow that the studio is leasing from one of the village's farmers. They pose the question how its value can be re-negotiated depending on the context it is traded within and thereby, how we can sustain shared resources, not as commodities, but as catalysts for relational world-building?

Harvest Salon is a Switzerland based design and filmmaking collective founded by Livni Holtz and Nicolas Seiler. Through artistic research and interventions they seek to foster emancipatory processes within rural communities in the Alps. Rooted in an ongoing engagement with a farming community and its communal labor system, their work explores new ways of engaging with and relating to rurality. Harvest Salon aims to establish platforms for cross-regional engagement, grounded in shared responsibilities for common resources. For Alcova they collaborated with Valentin Klauss, whose work explores the intersections of material culture, social structures and transformation.