Articulated around her recent artistic research on the camera, the gestures, gaze and social scenarios that this device induces, Dorothée Elisa Baumann is a conceptual intermedia artists working in Biel Bienne. In her artistic practice, she works with founded images, slogans, captions and historical references. The protocol and script is essential in her work, which she challenges. She deconstructs, breaks out and brings texts and signs in a new spaces together. The artist creates often shifts and stumbling blocks for the visitors and challenges the visitor – some interventions are like a punch in the face and others are rather subtle, the visitor has to engage with the work to perceive the provoked shift. Baumann articulates her work through different formats such as visual installations, video works, performance, objects and operations. Therefore, her work is to be understood as an assemblage of different artistic actions and gestures. The qualities and the specifics of a place such as economic, political and social questions are artistically processed in the aim to overcome division and dualism and open-up a field of experimentation.
During the realization of her last project, Pleasure Arousal Dominance, which was published in 2017 by the Centre de la Photographie Genève and Les presses du réel, the artist became aware of the technical limits of the camera in the social relation with the ‘other’ – the camera even does create division and racism and does not allow real empathy, she claims.
Therefore she wrote in 2016 an artistic manifest TAKE A BETTER PICTURE (see on her homepage). Baumann is believing that deconstruction has to be done through artwork as well on theoretical elocution at the same time. There should be no division between theory and practice. She works at the moment on the camera instruction manuals of the 20st and 21st century at the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Bern Switzerland. Her theoretical work (essays) will serve her later to create ‘technical disobedient tools’ and open-up an experimental field, where also traditional political questions of power-sharing, dualism and division challenged. The technical device and its’ process inside the camera – the technical ‘invisible space’ – is being challenged as a political and social ‘public’ space, in which ideas such as power-sharing, negotiation between actors and shared-production will be discussed and experienced anew. She wants to open-up a new critical political perspective on ‘the acts of photography’ as social scripts and scenarios.