In the valleys of the Dolomites, Millen Brown-Ewens spends time at a little-known biennial positing paradise as something fragile, communal and perpetually unfolding.
Not every biennial is deserving of its host. But nestled in the foothills of the Dolomites, Biennale Gherdëina might be the rare exception; an event so imbricated within its landscape that I find the lines between art and place begin, rather pleasantly, to melt away.
With just 28 exhibiting artists dispersed across the UNESCO-stamped alpine landscapes of Ortisei, Santa Cristina and Pilat, the usual queasy cocktail of dread and excitement served up by other marquee spectacles never really hits. Opening my balcony doors onto a view of the mountains, chamomile tea in hand, I decide that yes, this may just be the perfect panacea to the Venice hangover. In a gift shop selling handmade soaps and embroidered doilies, I’m tempted by an Ayurvedic singing bowl to reach optimal zen but am due at a press conference in twenty minutes, and there is, in fact, some rather good art to see.
Though a comparatively little-known fixture of the art world calendar, 2026 marks the tenth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina, which began in 2008 with just five artists. This year, curator Samuel Leuenberger is inviting visitors to consider Future) Paradise Gardens; speculative blueprints for coexistence, collapse and renewal.
“Very quickly, while working on this biennial, I realised it wasn’t going to simply be a garden exhibition,” Leuenberger tells Elephant. “It’s not about flowers or pastoral beauty. The garden emerges as something much broader; a space through which to think about the ways in which we shape, inhabit and negotiate a relationship to the world around us.”
The works on show here engage the notion of a pastoral paradise both obliquely and directly. In his ongoing project Koexistenzen, photographer Walter Niedermayr challenges the tradition of the garden as an enclosed, private space, to present the negotiated thresholds between private and communal life that have shaped nearly a thousand years of collective land stewardship in the Fiemme Valley. Elsewhere, artists draw on folk traditions, cosmology and archaeology to reimagine what it means to really inhabit and learn from a landscape, staging spectacles along steep alpine thoroughfares, re-activating abandoned hotels, agricultural barns and old railway tunnels.
In a former school in the village of Santa Cristina, Kelly Tissot is exhibiting a series of black and white photographs taken at local woodworking workshops. They’re intimate, unhurried images, a glimpse behind the scenes of the valley’s most established vernacular craft. A man selling figurines in a shop in the village told me earlier that day that wood carving has been a tradition here for more than 400 years. It began, as many enduring things do, out of necessity, a way for Ladin farmers to fill the uncompromising winters when the mountain passes closed and the land froze over. They carved toys, tools, and domestic utensils, selling them at the spring markets to stretch the meagre returns from farming. In time, the work grew more ambitious; gnomes, gnomes with toadstools, gnomes with their own little whittling tools, menageries of beasts and religious deities. I purchase a pair of painted ducks as a memento.
In Val Gardena, culture – subject to the capricious whims of weather – is fragile. I find it difficult to comprehend, apricating in a balmy twenty-eight degrees, that just ten days earlier, there had been snow all the way into the village.
“Nature constantly escapes our plans,” says Leuenberger, “maybe that’s precisely what makes the idea of a paradise garden meaningful. A garden in the Dolomites cannot simply be decorative. It represents something more humble and urgent, a negotiation with circumstance and a practice of adaptation, patience, and care.”
Gardening, I’ve come to learn, humbles you quickly. You plant something and sometimes it flourishes beautifully. Often, and in the case of a particularly crispy monstera of mine (RIP), it disappears completely despite your most ardent attention. Leuenberger highlights the strange similarities between a person tending to a garden and an artist at work. “In both cases,” he says, “one tries to create conditions for something to emerge but never with complete control over the outcome.”
In Ortisei, artist Pedro Abu Wirz and philosopher Michael Marder sit with this notion long enough to find the strange logic in the seemingly oxymoronic nourishment of decomposition. Perched on the town’s central fountain are two garden bodies, woven and plugged with soil, grass, twigs and seeds. When I visit the sculptures, Abu Wirz is misting them with water from the fountain, his own “act of care”, he tells me. Over the course of the biennial, these curious plant people are foreseeably subject to change – drying, sprouting, crumbling – in one way or another, returning to the earth from whence they came.
“In situating the process of decomposition in anthropomorphic figures, we wanted to undo the rigid dividing lines between plants and people, between the body of the Earth, and the living organisms populating it, between growth and decay, the nourishing and the nourished,” Abu Wirz says.
That the realisation of any future paradise garden is corrupted by the wasteland it presupposes is certainly not lost at the Biennale Gherdëina. “Part of the difficulty of imagining futures is that so many feel uncertain,” says Leuenberger. “Our ecosystems are generally under pressure; forests are disappearing, glaciers melting, and the environments are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. This is where art becomes important. Not because it solves these problems directly, but because it allows us to slow down, to observe differently and remain emotionally imaginative.”
In her video Green Grey Black Brown (2024), Yuyan Wang contends with the unsettling realities of a synthetic landscape. Composed of found footage from industrial and commercial contexts, as well as plastic production at a site in South China, the piece reflects on the strange cycle of petro-capitalism. The screen flashes with close-ups of workers assembling artificial flowers, mudslides, and wide-angle shots of bare mountains being sprayed with green paint. Sat on a carpet of artificial grass – itself a petroleum byproduct, dead in every sense that matters – we watch flora resurrected, nature simulated, commodified, and sold back to us.
The question of what replaces nature and what marks its absence runs throughout the valley. Jacopo Belloni’s Heath Robinson-esque olfactory contraption extracts the deliciously soporific essence of pine while, nearby, seeds native to Val Gardena are carried in assortments of translucent glass bags which, after the biennial, will be buried and exhumed annually for the next twenty years, tracking their dormancy. Facing the village cemetery of Santa Cristina, Ana Prvački has erected four marble beehives as commemorative monuments to the increasingly threatened honeybee population. In the mountains, the stakes are even higher. Quite literally.
Positioned at 15-metre altitude intervals across the steep, now-green piste of Maso Pilat, a collaborative installation by landscape architect Bas Smets and art director Eliane Le Roux sees 300 snow depth poles trace the altitudinal transect of snowline retreat. Each step between them represents an estimated five metres of annual snowline rise, their vertical span equivalent to roughly three years of global warming. Over the past century, the Dolomites’ snowline has retreated by around 250 metres; a further 500 is projected over the next hundred years. Appropriating the mountain’s most familiar signage into an object of contemplation, the work produces something Le Roux muses may become a vintage relic for future generations; a monument to what has been lost.
“If there’s something that mountains can teach us, it is humility,” Leuenberger reflects. “They remind us that growth is slow, that coexistence requires negotiation, that nature cannot be fully controlled and that paradise is not a finished condition waiting for us, but a continuous practice.” What the biennial advocates is that a future paradise garden, if it even exists, will not be one in which our conflicts magically disappear but rather a place for us to meet one another with respect and dignity and hopefully leave behind some small good before we shuffle off this mortal coil. In the Dolomites, amongst the stones, wood, fog, warm hospitality and layered histories, the possibility feels fragile, but still within reach.
