VORLAGE AUF BASIS Gold

«Everything is nature – there is only a degree of naturalness», postulated the Zurich architect, landscape designer, and visionary of ecological awareness in the 1980s, Eduard Neuenschwander. Climate, time, chance, and probability shape the environment through dynamic optimization processes: stones, mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, seas, microorganisms, plants, animals, and man are part of these natural – that is, chemical, physical, and biological – processes. Through his cultural practices, man intervenes in these processes. He cultivates the land and invents agriculture, becomes sedentary, and builds houses and factories. He connects them with roads, railways, and airplanes, organizes himself into villages, towns, and agglomerations. The buildings created by man are also subject to constant processes of change. They are created, altered, and maintained – as long as they serve a purpose. If they are neglected or abandoned, they decay and nature is taking over again.

The images of «Gold And Other Coasts» were created between 2019 and 2024. They depict real places with which Reto Gadola is familiar. His home on the Zurich Gold Coast forms the starting point of the investigation. In the booming metropolitan area around the economic hub of Zurich, centuries-old village structures  and identities are being destroyed systematically. Rampant real estate speculation is fuelling this periurbain «densification» and caters to the needs of a wealthy – often international – clientele. In stark contrast, Mérigny in the French Département Indre, an agriculturally shaped village in the French province, tells a different story. After a brief economic boom in the late 19th century, the town was left behind economically and is now marked by rural depopulation and abandoned houses. Here, Reto has found a photographic home. The situation in the southern French Sète is more nuanced, a port town on the Mediterranean where Reto spends his summer holidays with his family. Situated at the key junction between sea and land, the town gained economic significance with the construction of the Canal du Midi at the end of the 17th century. Over the course of the 20th century, its prosperity faded – the seaside resorts initiated by President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s were realized elsewhere. Sète remained seafaring, rough, and rugged. Recently, Reto has often been in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, still a center of global trade, cosmopolitan, and shaped by a turbulent history. It is not small rowing boats, as on Lake Zurich, that define the dimensions and materiality of the place, but huge container ships, port facilities, and the transport arteries of post-war reconstruction.

The photographs of «Gold And Other Coasts» are two-dimensional representations of the real environment, cropped and framed. In the service of a heightened degree of abstraction and a less obvious connection to time, color information has been omitted. They are black and white, in a square format, and their content is guided by an architecturally informed gaze. The images are a kind of empirical visual analysis of phenomena and conditions in natural landscapes and in those altered by man. Spaces, buildings, and places are depicted in their simplicity or complexity, or as ghostly appearances at night. Natural and culturally induced processes of transformation in the environment become visible – driven by climate, time, chance, and probability.