For Sandra Knecht, Heimat, or home, is a mutable formation that embraces animals and patterns of life around her: crop rotations, flight paths, commuting workers. Her installation Home Is a Foreign Place incorporates sculptures, found objects and photography, rooted in the scenographic tradition of Swiss fruit orchards. The Bee House is a restored apiary that had been occupied by a wasps’ nest, then a dormouse, attesting to the profound intelligence of animal life. A bronze cast of Knecht’s favourite pear tree, which fell in a storm, usually resides in her garden; there, it becomes a haven for insects and nesting animals. In the photographic series Tschinns, Knecht engages her own body to reconcile Swiss folk stories of mountain spirits with her adult psychic impressions of convergence between physical and immaterial worlds, using performance as her shield to excavate things that, as Knecht says, “continue to rage in the body”.
Knecht lives in a village, with her partner, dogs, and their other animals. Although verdant and peaceful, village existence can be fraught for those who live and love outside normative social frameworks. Indeed, Knecht’s projects often press the question of how much diversity a society is willing to tolerate – a political demand as much as a philosophical enquiry about how to live together well.
—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo
