Statement

What really bothers and irritates me is the human intervention in nature, especially the whims I see meant to ward off some kind of fear, it makes me furious. I was born and raised in Chilean Patagonia and eventually lived in Switzerland. What shocked me most and still surprises me when I arrived in Switzerland are the countless restaurants on mountain summits, the unnecessary infrastructure in nature that should be untouched, the playgrounds for children in the forests… Do we really need all this nonsense? For what? Aren’t the forests and natural spaces enough? Is it really necessary to intervene everywhere? I document this human interference in the landscape in my works in an ironically “beautiful” way”.

 

Bio

The Chilean–Swiss artist Oliver Staeuber (1980) currently lives in Bern, Switzerland. He began to take an interest in the visual arts in 1999 during his studies in architecture. Ten years later he moved from Chile to Switzerland, where he continued to develop his career as an architect and his work as an artist. Staeuber’s work focuses on the depiction of natural landscapes, animals, and traditional rituals to explore the tense relationship between humans and nature, with particular attention to the direct effects of human action.