Dominique Bartels works with photography, video, archives and textiles. Her work explores relationships within the living world, often drawing on the gestures of textile-making and the transformation of natural fibers to reflect on the shifting boundaries between nature and culture. She holds a BA in Photography from ECAL (2023) and lives and works in Zurich.
The installation The Threads That Hold the Earth Together explores the plasticity of the photographic and videographic image through weaving. It brings into focus the intertwined material and historical trajectories of weaving, photography and video. A short film unfolds alongside two canvases, woven and unwoven from linen, photographic film, and magnetic tape.
The looping film moves from grain to pixel and from flax seed to linen fabric. It draws on two image sources: found diapositives documenting Swiss flax production around 1900, and footage of linen emerging on a loom, recorded on MiniDV tape. That same tape is woven into one of the canvases. The sound of a weaving shuttle, reminiscent of a slide projector, accompanies the installation.
The work traces the underlying connections between nature and culture, analog and digital, and past and present.
