DIMITRI BÄHLER
DUST AND SUNLIGHT

06.09 –
08.11.2025

SECOND NATURE PROJECTS
PFINGSTWEIDSTR. 31
8005 ZÜRICH

Potted plants set the tone—simple, yet too intentional to be overlooked. The hand-built pots, made in collaboration with gardener Sebastian Rüdisüli, mark the starting point of Bähler's latest project. It speaks of time, traces, and the impulse to shape with one’s hands. Here, the cultivation of plants meets the cultivation of making, raising the question of noticing—what comes into view and what slips past.

In botany, one speaks of plant blindness—the tendency to see plants as undifferentiated green. Bähler’s work resists this blur of perception. From this starting point, he turns to what is close at hand: the eye that Rüdisüli brings to plants, he extends to materials on the margins—fragments that might otherwise go unnoticed. A discarded family table carries its memories into softened benches and side pieces; found concrete and bent steel become sculptural supports or a low table on castors; metal samples bend into lighting objects—reduced rather than engineered.

These works allow imperfections and traces, showing a way of making that is deliberate yet unforced—marked by simple interventions rather than polish or market logic. Dust and Sunlight turns Bähler’s studio into a landscape, between shed and garden. The image recalls French landscape architect Gilles Clément’s jardin en mouvement, where growth is not imposed but guided. Bähler’s approach is one of tending—restrained yet open, attentive to what grows at the edges.

Photography: Claude Barrault