28.09.2025 – 01.02.2026

Curated by
Tobia Bezzola and Virginia Marano

In collaboration with
The Estate of David Weiss

Since the early twentieth century, Carona has been a place of passage and refuge for artists and writers. Many of these people come from Germany or from German-speaking Switzerland, and they are often driven by strong political convictions. This small village, nestled between Lake Lugano and Monte San Salvatore, becomes a laboratory of ideas and visions – a meeting point between daily life and imagination, between nature and experimentation.

Figures such as Lisa Tetzner and Kurt Kläber (also known by the pseudonym Kurt Held), Lisa and Theo Wenger, their daughter Ruth and her husband Hermann Hesse, as well as Meret Oppenheim and her many illustrious guests from the world of the international avant-garde: all contribute to making the idyllic Ticinese village a fertile ground for thought, dialogue, and creative work.

It is in this atmosphere that the experience of Casa Aprile takes shape. At first, it is a residence for artists, musicians, and writers in search of new forms of expression and living. Not a structured collective, but a fluid and informal community where work and intuition are shared.

The most significant figure in the history of Casa Aprile in the 1970s is David Weiss (1946–2012), who here takes his first steps on his inventive journey that would later lead to the formation of the duo Fischli/Weiss. In Carona, he draws, writes, records, observes. Around him move like-minded figures such as Esther Altorfer, Anton Bruhin, Maria Gregor, Urs Lüthi, Penelope Margaret Mackworth-Praed, Iwan Schumacher, Peter Schweri, and Willy Spiller.

This exhibition reconstructs the shape of this microcosm, in dialogue with other realities like the homes Casa Costanza and Casa Pantrovà, which, together with Casa Aprile, form an archipelago of artistic experiences and emotional bonds. Renovated by Christoph Wenger, nephew of Meret Oppenheim, Casa Aprile becomes, from the late 1960s onwards, the center of this space of freedom – a lived-in home, in which the walls welcome rather than divide. Through works, archival materials, and visual and audio testimonies – many shown here for the first time – the exhibition traces the years from 1968 to 1978: a fascinating decade of freedom and dialogue, in which art is nourished by friendship and exchange.

The Dream of Casa Aprile is a tribute to Carona and its ability to be a home – not a static space, but a place of passage and transformation. A place where people arrive, create, and then move on. And yet, something always lingers.

Already in the first half of the 1900s, Carona is home to a rich history of artistic and literary presences. Here, figures such as Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Richter, and Ignazio Silone live and work. The writers’ couple Lisa Tetzner and Kurt Kläber move to Carona in the 1930s and in 1954 build their own home, Casa Pantrovà, turning it into an international centre for intellectuals in exile.

In 1917, Theo Wenger, a knife-maker from Delémont, purchases a summer residence that comes to be known as Casa Costanza, and relocates with his wife, the painter and author of children’s books Lisa Wenger-Ruutz (Joggeli söll ga Birli schüttle!; Joggeli should go and shake the pear tree!, 1908), and their family to the Ticinese village. Their daughter Ruth marries Hermann Hesse, who finds in Carona a landscape for reflection and rest – as expressed in his texts and watercolours. To this day, his descriptions of walks to the Madonna d’Ongero church convey a sense of contemplation and of being at one with silence.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Meret Oppenheim, granddaughter of Lisa Wenger, hosts many friends and artists from the international art world at Casa Costanza, such as Leonor Fini, Max Ernst, and Daniel Spoerri. In a letter to her brother Burkhard Wenger in 1967, the village is described as an affective and creative space, suspended between remembrance and transformation, “a lost paradise” of which she keeps “a radiant memory.”

“[ ... ] Certainly, it was also to rediscover a little of that ‘lost paradise,’ the house as I had preserved it in my memories. Unlike school, I had a radiant memory of it. I even thought that the weather there was always magnificent! It was always the month of August! [ ... ] Now I have only one wish left: that a promising spirit reigns over this house, that peace and harmony will also guide those who will come after us.”

From a letter from Meret Oppenheim to her brother Burkhard Wenger, 11 March 1967

Long before it is discovered by the generation of David Weiss, Carona is already open to new ideas and new ways of life, in which everyday existence and artistic creation, nature and art deeply intertwine.

David Weiss is born in Zurich’s Albisrieden district, the son of a pastor. It is in the city that he makes his first discoveries: the dynamic environment of the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) offers constant stimulation, thanks to interactions with peers who will become lifelong companions – among them Urs Lüthi.

At the time, the city on the Limmat is filled with creative tension, but daily life is constrained by rules and pressures. It is from this urban intensity that the need for an “elsewhere” arises for Weiss. Though he returns to Zurich in 1968 after his studies in Basel and long travels abroad, his relationship with the city changes. He begins spending long periods in Carona, where the rhythm slows, space opens up, and drawing becomes a kind of diary – a daily gesture that turns into an inner practice. It is in this dialectic between city and landscape that his first visual vocabulary takes shape.

Zurich does not vanish, but turns into a space of resonance. In the works of Weiss and his friends Anton Bruhin, Peter Schweri, Iwan Schumacher, and Willy Spiller, who often stay in Carona for extended periods, artificial lights, records sounds, architectural details, and anonymous corners resurface. These urban fragments are carried into the quiet of Carona, absorbed and reshaped through new sensibilities.

For them, drawing means perceiving the world from elsewhere. It means transforming the experience of the city into memory, and memory into form. It also means redefining artistic practice as a form of crossing – as a living trace left between different places, times, and states of mind.

The history of Carona is, ultimately, a story of continuous reinvention. In this village, the idea of belonging is not tied to ownership, but the ability to shape the environment through one’s own agency. Here, the house is never a fixed structure, but a living organism, shaped by those who inhabit it, by the conversations held, by the marks left behind. In restorations, in details, in everyday relationships, another kind of memory takes shape, collective and never complete.

Casa Aprile represents one of the most fertile nodes in the creative constellation that animates Carona between the 1960s and 1970s. Purchased by Meret Oppenheim at the end of the sixties and entrusted to her nephew Christoph Wenger, the house welcomes artists and friends in a spirit of sharing and experimentation – and among the first is David Weiss. In exchange for hospitality, the artist takes part in the restoration work, leaving a personal mark on the fireplace – a small reptile carved into a medallion – that endures to this day as a trace of his memory.

Between 1968 and 1978, Weiss stays regularly in Carona for extended periods. Around him gather kindred voices: Anton Bruhin records the sounds of the village, Willy Spiller captures its atmosphere through photography, Peter Schweri chases colors in motion, Iwan Schumacher transforms the walk to Madonna d’Ongero into visual sequences, and Esther Altorfer works with light as a living material.

The artworks and materials presented in the exhibition trace the contours of that shared, creative, and simultaneously existential experience. The relationship between home and movement is never fixed: it is a practice, a continuous negotiation between what is inhabited and what is crossed. The work and figure of David Weiss thus become emblematic of a search that intertwines living and creating, being and becoming.

For David Weiss, drawing is not just a means of expression, but a daily practice – a tool for thinking and reconfiguration. Tracing marks on paper becomes a way for him to explore the world and the self, not by following a predetermined plan, but by letting himself be guided by an inner rhythm. This method opens up to the unexpected, making it an exercise in attention – a space where even error can become possibility.

Between 1975 and 1979, he develops his series Wandlungen (Metamorphoses): over eighty sequences of drawn metamorphoses, created between Marrakech, Carona, and Zurich. Each page begins with a minimal mark – a line, a cube – that transforms into a box, an animal, a body, a landscape. There is no plot, but a continuous sliding: each figure slips into the next, following a logic that is not narrative, but visual, made of subtle shifts, sudden slippages, and tensions between forms.

The uninterrupted flow of images – in which each element generates the next according to an associative and transformative reasoning – recalls the narrative structure of Lisa Wenger-Ruutz’s children’s tale Joggeli söll ga Birli schüttle! (1908), where each step draws the next into an unexpected chain of cause and effect. David Weiss’s drawings unfold according to a similar dynamic. As Iwan Schumacher writes:

“Without knowing in advance what he wants to draw, he begins each time at the upper left-hand corner of the sheet of paper, for example with a scribble, a dart, or a cube. The cube turns into a matchbox with a picture of a lion on it and a small deer inside it, which turns into a bone. The bone turns into a little man who pushes with all his might against the sides of the matchbox until the box collapses. The little man gets scared and, flat on his stomach, looks down over the edge of the cardboard base. The series of images ends with an ear of corn in which every grain has a face with a long nose. Pictures of those faces continue over several pages until a new series begins.”

Iwan Schumacher, Chur, 2014

For Weiss, drawing is a poetics of becoming. A freehand practice, open to the unforeseen, capable of welcoming both fragility and lightness. Through this medium, the world takes shape time and again – uncertain, infused with irony or with a silent tension.

In Carona, drawing and independent publishing emerge as practices of proximity – ways of remaining in dialogue, seeking alternative paths, and resisting conformity. Matthyas Jenny, founder of the publishing house Nachtmaschine (Night Machine), conceives the book as a gesture, a poetic and political act.

In 1976, he prints the first issues of the literary magazine Nachtmaschine in Carona. The publishing project stands out in the Swiss literary scene. His visionary approach is rooted in the American Beat culture movement, and he is connected to some of the most radical contemporary international writers.

“What do you want to do with the printing press?” they asked him.
“I’ll print a magazine or a newspaper with articles that I think are good. I want to print books that I think are good.”
“With that machine?” asked Dave (David Weiss).
“Yes, right, with that machine,” he said casually.
“And when do you want to print things on that machine?” asked Maria (Maria Gregor) with a glance towards the children.
“When they’re asleep,” he said, “at night, every night,” laughing, “it’s a night machine!”

Zoë und Caspar Jenny, Die Nachtmaschine, 2024

A similar energy also runs through the work of David Weiss, for whom drawings are not created solely for galleries and museums but also find their place in notebooks, booklets, and self-produced comics. Between 1973 and 1979, Weiss creates a series of drawn notebooks – including I Wish That I Sailed the Darkened Seas, Frauen (Women), Im Bad (In the Bath) and the “Regenbüchlein” (Little Rain Book) – which combine graphic elements, fragmentary storytelling, and surreal humor, anticipating the transformative spirit of his later work with Peter Fischli.

These books, now collected under the title Nine Books 1973–1979, are not intended as sketches, but as autonomous works – true visual archives of his creative universe. In dialogue with publishing, drawing becomes for Weiss a daily, intimate, and liberated practice – one capable of generating forms, stories, and associations beyond any predefined structure. In Carona, this approach finds fertile ground: a community where drawing, publishing, photographing, and storytelling are not separate acts, but gestures of a collective and poetic way of life.