Switzerland

Florence Iff

Biography

I was born in Switzerland where I am currently living. Before spending four years in New York City where I absolved the fulltime program of ICP, I was educated as an artist. Subsequently I graduated as a teacher of fine arts.
I have been awarded the Sony World Photography Award (WPO) Best Photographer of the Year category Landscape as well as second place winner category Fine Art Landscape at
IPA (International Photography Awards) in 2011 and First Place in the Nature Category in PWP’s International Women’s Juried Exhibition& Honorable Mention in PWP’s 36th Anniversarycall for entry 2012.
Selected pieces and series have been exhibited in several juried shows.

Whenever I encounter Thuja as a privacy hedge I'm overcome by a feeling of both rejection and repulsion as well as anxiety and distress. There always seems to be more than the simple necessity of privacy behind these fences, something mysterious and concealed, very close but not visible to the passerby. It also suggests uncanny lurking on the wrong side of the hedge, namely inside the garden or the house.
Connecting the meaning of the common name "tree of life” (because resins of these trees were used medicinally in Western Europe and therefore suggesting immortality and resurrection) with the contemporary use of Thuja, obscuring and preventing a gaze behind the scene from the outside has an contradictory and somewhat morbid effect. It implicates more a denial than affirmation of life.
Ultimately and literally the insight into another world is being hindered from either side. There remains a glimpse between deliberate or inadvertent gaps.

Orchids have always been an object of longing and desire. Especially in aristocratic circles the cultivation of orchids have been a pleasant pastime and has been thoroughly documented in movies as a passion of elder ladies and gentlemen of higher society. Thanks to globalisation and its implicating goods being available at anytime and everywhere the orchids emerged as mass phenomenon in shopping malls and thus became ubiquitous in private windows and shop windows of the common people. Wherever I go, these over-aesthetic flowers are to be admired in European windows. Either in farms in the Val de Travers or in Berlin Neukölln; orchids nod omnipresently and coolly to the passerby behind or before curtains.
The game of deception of the reflection of the outside space with interior installations underlines the topic of the exchangeability. The orchid between the inside and the outside (but on the surface of the picture), stands as a representative of an exotic prostitute in our domestic windows.

As traditions in Switzerland have been rediscovered as a way of finding identity in a globalized world, the pagan tradition of "Silvesterchläuse" in the village of Urnäsch has more and more tourists accompanying the procession. The original meaning of the day is the eviction of the old and bad spirits and simultaneously inviting the new ones for the year to come. Since the ritual was held way before the Gregorian calendar took over the Julian one, the procession is now taking place twice. The first time in the 31st of December and like the old times January 13th.
There are different kinds of costumes, mostly made of natural materials the farmers find in forests or fields. They travel from farm to farm evicting the old spirits by shaking their heavy bells making a lot of noise.
The contrast between the old ritual and its implications and the new setting of the village is striking but still has a strong impact on the community of the village.