Valerie Geissbühler Pacheco
Soft Matter in Interwoven Worlds
Valerie Geissbühler Pacheco
40% Independent artist, Zurich; 40% Barista, Zurich;
20% Freelance photographer, Zurich
Bachelor, Photography, ECAL, Lausanne, 2023
Soft Matter in Interwoven Worlds
2021–2023
Switzerland
Diploma, Bachelor, Photography, ECAL, Lausanne, 2023
• Brechtoldshof (R.&C. Jakob) • Inoverde Fenaco (L. Wittwer) • Kinsaccoccha (Juan de Dios Huraka Pacc) • Swiss Agricultural Museum Burgain (F. Luchsinger) • Terralog AG (J. Moret) • My dear friends, family, and potatoes
video, booklet, art works (framed photography)
booklet: 145 × 200 mm
Monitor: 13”
Artworks: various
.mov, 1920 × 1080 px, 2’31”
Archival fine art print, plexiglas frames, monitor, paper, wood pedestal, love, care
Soft Matter in Interwoven Worlds is a multimedia installation assembling narratives around the potato.
Through a video and booklet, the artist reflects on the potato’s historical and familial significance, blending archival images, personal documentations and research. She explores its ties to both her Peruvian and Swiss heritages, weaving together generations and cultures.
In a second, speculative part, the artist reappropriates the potato through auto-fictional imagery. Green light is used to suppresses germination of potatoes, pink light encourages growth; these colours become a language for transformation. The potato’s evolving forms emerge alongside her body, rooting into skin, slipping into eyes. Human and non-human intertwine.
Recognising the potato as more than a nurturer, the artist works with it as a vessel to explore her identity as a bicultural woman, reflecting on birth, growth, loss and decay. Leaving her to wonder: have I been breeding you, or have you been birthing me?
