Miscellaneous The Jura in the art museum and at the 60th Solothurn Film Festival

SDA

16.1.2025 - 11:01

Katrin Steffen is the director of the Solothurn Art Museum. For the exhibition "Jurabilder. Imaginaires du Jura", her institution has collaborated with the 60th Solothurn Film Festival. Steffen promises "refreshing and surprising views of the Jura".
Katrin Steffen is the director of the Solothurn Art Museum. For the exhibition "Jurabilder. Imaginaires du Jura", her institution has collaborated with the 60th Solothurn Film Festival. Steffen promises "refreshing and surprising views of the Jura".
Keystone

The Solothurn Film Festival is celebrating an anniversary this year with its 60th edition - and is collaborating with the Solothurn Art Museum for the first time. Museum director Katrin Steffen explains how the film comes to the museum

Keystone-SDA

Three days before the Solothurn Film Days start (22.01.), the exhibition "Jurabilder. Imaginaires du Jura" (19.01.) opens at the Solothurn Art Museum three days before the Solothurn Film Days begin (22.01.).

For Katrin Steffen, director of the art museum for just over three years, it is "a stroke of luck when topics can be approached together in this way", as she says in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. The new crew around Film Festival Director Niccolò Castelli had asked her. "The signs were good right from the start," says Steffen, "as we both started our work more or less at the same time, looked around the cultural scene in Solothurn and wanted to network."

A region at the center

The second special feature in addition to the first-time connection: The Film Festival's retrospective does not focus on one person as usual, but on a region. The Jura. "An area at the southern foot of which the Film Festival and we ourselves are at home," says Steffen, "but at the same time an area that points beyond national and linguistic borders." With a view to the Jura, the organizers asked themselves what the essence of this landscape is.

Landscape has always been an important theme in numerous art forms, says the museum director, which constantly evokes new questions and is inextricably linked to social trends. "Today, for example, we are faced with the contrast that we have probably never been so far away from untouched nature, but at the same time all the sunset photos on social media show how great our longing for it is."

Painting, film, photography

The exhibition is multidisciplinary - showing photography as well as painting and film - and spans a wide range from the 18th century to the present day, between scientific and emotional approaches, between realism and symbolism, between idyll and reality. On display are not only found objects, such as a work by the painter Caspar Wolf, the daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey or the photographs by Eugène Cattin. There is also something completely new: the performance duo Anne and Jean Rochat and the interdisciplinary artist Augustin Rebetez are presenting works that were created especially for this exhibition.

"Every medium has its own rules," says Steffen. Painting, photography and film are mutually dependent and cross-fertilizing. It was therefore also about exploring interfaces and crossing boundaries. And: to show how the different art forms have dealt with the massive changes in the Jura over the last 200 years in the areas of tourism, industrialization, agriculture and urban sprawl.

Connections to film

The links to film are obvious when it comes to the Jura. There is the natural topos, which also has great significance in moving images, as well as the emotions and questions of identity, home and belonging. "However, we didn't want to set up a cinema in the museum," says Steffen, "but rather enter into a dialog with what the Film Days have to offer." As part of this retrospective, they are showing over 30 works from over 100 years, all of which were filmed in the Jura Arc. "Our programs complement each other and offer different perspectives that encourage people to reflect on their own perception of nature and landscape."

According to the museum director, the amount of work behind the project was challenging and the schedule was tight. Around a year ago, the interdisciplinary teams set out for the first time, researching and collecting. Steffen talks about surprising, sometimes accidental finds, special discoveries and rich exchanges.

Katrin Steffen, who regularly attended the Film Days even before her time as museum director and knows them well, is convinced that this first-time collaboration will also create added value for the public. "The exhibition provides a refreshing and surprising look at the Jura, an area that many people think they already know. "*

*This text by Raphael Amstutz, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.