At Medienfrische, a new myth emerged through observation, collection, and ritual. Moving between the village church, mountain forest, and crumbling walls, the project explored how belief and folklore take shape when humans live with the force of nature. In the Bschlab Valley, where stone, pine, and water act more powerfully than human hands, a temporary temple arose from what was found: pinecones interlocked like scales, river clay binding fragments, plastic sheets whispering as wind-installations before turning into costume. Villagers’ donated objects, fallen branches, and abandoned materials fused into a sculpture that remained in flux—half-natural and half-made, neither ruin nor monument but something in between.

The temple stood as a window on a ruin, framing the site’s fragility while opening onto new visions. By day, it echoed the valley’s material cycles of erosion and repair; by night, it shifted into an audiovisual installation, projecting collected images and field recordings back into the landscape. This double life—as ruin by day and portal by night—embodied the valley’s thresholds between material and spectral, human and elemental. The structure never claimed permanence; instead it existed as a transitional body, eroded and reanimated in rhythm with the valley itself.

A wearable sculpture extended this entanglement of materials into the body. Built from moss, branches, and wood interwoven with discarded plastic, 3D-printing waste, mesh fabric, duct tape, and cloth, it became a hybrid skin. Transformed into a headpiece, moss beard, and body covering, it turned the artist into the forest god—part insect, part motorcyclist—condensing the project’s central tensions into a single figure. Spoken-word invocations and a ritual with dandelions—wishes placed on the altar until the wind carried them away—activated the site, while red inscriptions echoed blessings once painted on village ruins, linking the work to a fading ritual language.

Resisting binaries of nature and culture, permanence and ruin, belonging and displacement, the project unfolded as a dialogue with material agency. It expands a practice rooted in migration and ritual into ecological myth-making, where gods are not remembered but encountered.