Barns Barrning

Ställe Stallen

Melioration, machines and a milk pipeline have left the sentinel stalls to the marmots—having lost their previous full-time jobs of housing hay, sleeping children and grunting animals. Over 600 of these unemployed stalls have taken up sheltering of a different order, their lower bellies now home to spare parts and extra materials, their untended roofs becoming mountain mineral restaurants for moss and lichen. Wooden walls sag with the weight of weather or fall into compost for the raspberries gone astray, planted by calloused hands a century ago. The barns now moonlight as stoic empty icons yet offer unseen resources—it is a slow undoing of the past. They are stoic but not static, nor should they be, their private lives are intimate, secret and hidden and this is what keeps me in thrall.

Practice research, psychogeographical wanderings, movement, making, curation and correspondence have led to a subtle syncopation with the barns of Valsertal. It is an animate engagement as I am in love with them—interested in their aliveness, my making with them is a process of growing together, of listening, of touching, of dancing, of barning. A slow discovery of their language—uncovered through those who dwell alongside them. The barns are barning as we are humaning and together we make new memories letting the future unfold contingently.