Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin). Batia Sutter

Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) has been published on the occasion of Batia Suter´s exhibition at the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland (built 2,000 meters above sea level, it is the highest dam in Europe). For this artist book, Suter focused on her ever-expanding archive of scanned landscape images, which had already started to play an important role in Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Roma 284, 2016). Many of those images depict wastelands, alternating between romantic and menacing views which simultaneously create sensations of majesty and disorientation. By layering them over each other, a variety of disparate geological and biological environments merge into composite landscapes we might only recognise from dreams and fairy tales. In the books sequence, a kind of adventurous journey takes shape, pitched between an odyssey, a safari and paradise. The book´s title is derived from the term Hexameter, a poetic form of writing used in Homer´s Odyssey. Mont-Voisin, which also serves as the title for the exhibition, is inspired by different spellings used by 18th and 19th century travellers to describe Mauvoisi