Latent Touch
September 18th – September 26th 2026
Supported by Memoria Artistica Chema Alvargonzalez
Valentine E. Bossert (Nyon, CH) is a visual artist based in Berlin, with a background in fine art, philosophy and archaeology. Working mainly with graphite and ink on paper, found materials and clay, Bossert makes drawings, prints and sculptures that translate physical encounters into objects.
Her work is situated in the in-between: the threshold where a body meets the material world, and where matter holds what language cannot. She is drawn to surfaces on which human meaning has settled without being declared, such as the weathered stones of a Roman amphitheatre, the tool marks of the Carrara quarries or the pavements of Berlin. What interests her is not their symbolic weight but their muteness and their ambivalence, and what time has transformed in them: what is missing, what is deteriorating, what is coming loose. The works that follow hold contradiction together rather than resolving it: fragile in appearance yet durable, faithful to their source yet distinct from it, closer to memory than to a copy.
Each project begins with a period of research on a site, on how it was built and used and on what its material qualities record of that history. The method that follows is experimental and deliberately simple: Bossert describes, records and reproduces her surroundings with means borrowed from archaeology, letting the material speak for itself. What results is a negative form, a record of contact that preserves a surface while becoming something else, made less by an author than by an interpreter of the physical environment who curates what emerges on its own.
In a dematerialised and information-saturated present, this work insists on the tangible and on what resists digital mediation and linguistic capture. Bossert’s pieces are documents of interaction rather than declarations, and they ask for a slower, haptic kind of attention. What visitors are invited into is the gap the work opens: inside nature but removed from it, bound to the present but carrying history, alive but impermanent, self and other at once. What lies in that gap is theirs to decipher.
Valentine E. Bossert (Berlin/Switzerland)
