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.

The 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, the costume turned the artist into a forest god figure—part insect, part motorcyclist—embodying two radically different modes of temporary presence in the valley. The insect belongs to the forest's cycles, a legitimate inhabitant; the motorcyclist (the BMW riders whose engines shatter the valley's quiet, treating nature as a test track for expensive machines) extracts experience without participation. As a migrant artist occupying my own transient position in this landscape, I refused to resolve these contradictions. The costume held them in tension: temporary but attentive, foreign but listening, neither fully belonging nor merely passing through.

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.

1
I wandered through the forest
and saw shrine in every form
– house for Jesus, arranged stones,
and where wind had laid pinecones.
Shaped by hands, wind, gravity and decay
I begin to wonder:

Is this shrine a creation,
dreams set in stone
or a coincidence

2
In this forest,
creating a shrine takes very little effort.

A hollow beneath tree root
is enough to shield a sacred thing.

Pinecones and stones become offerings.

What is more sacred than a seed?

3
A goddess stands inthe forest.
A tree stump, curved like a women

Around her, other stumps
form a silent circle –
the guards, sisters, witnesses

The forest chose her shape,
we chose her story.

4
The cut trees became offering tables,
They held pinecones, fallen stones.

Rain soaked the wounds,
then moss arrived – followed by fungi.

What’s cut becomes cradle,
death folding gently into new life.

5
He came with thunder.
The trees shivered before he appeared.

Wrapped in black armor,
chrome bones, leather skin –
a beetle made from fuel and noise.

He left no offering.
Only the echo of rupture.

6
A window, crooked like a question.
Beneath it, red text washed out by rain.
blessing once painted for a new home.
the words faded, the story lingers.

A temple is a space
that holds what we hope for.
Like the abandoned mining cave.
Not for prayer, but for the shimmer of a future.

My temple holds nothing, but air and wishes.