Better Safe than Sorry - Wiedemann Mettler - Hardcover

Wiedemann, Pascale; Mettler, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3858814407 ISBN 13: 9783858814401

Publisher: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2015

Synopsis

Over the past thirty years, Switzerland and the surrounding Alpine region have been battered by storms, including a severe one that swept through the Saint-Gotthard Massif in 1987, flooding the lower Reuss Valley and drowning more than nine hundred farm animals. The recurrence of flooding in the region has increased the likelihood of regular natural disasters, which has in turn made public safety during natural disasters among its chief concerns―even as uncertainty remains about how best to accomplish this.
           
The ambivalence surrounding public safety is taken up in this book by the artistic duo Pascale Wiedemann and Daniel Mettler―better known as wiedemann/mettler―who prepared an installation, Better Safe Than Sorry, for Switzerland’s House of Art Uri. In it, the region’s vulnerability to floods is overlaid with the story of Noah’s ark, with more than one hundred taxidermied animals placed throughout the museum and courtyard. In this setting, the animals and other objects, once familiar, are invested with new and unsettling meanings that shake our ideas about this symbolic narrative and the broader topic of public safety. Documenting this installation, the book includes contributions from novelist Ruth Schweikert and Swiss historian Philipp Sarasin.

About this title

About the Author

Pascale Wiedemann and Daniel Mettler make up the Zürich-based artistic duo wiedemann/mettler. Better Safe Than Sorry, which closed in August 2014 at the House of Art Uri, was their first solo exhibition.    

About this edition

• Publisher: Scheidegger and Spiess
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 3858814407
• ISBN 13: 9783858814401
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 92