Alex Grunenfelder

Independent Artist, Canada, Switzerland

The 2022 Kurhaus Alpenblick Air Tasting Menu describes the sensory experience of an air cure sanatorium and speculates about the role of the senses in the history of climatic therapy.

Air Tasting is a project to re-enchant the atmosphere and draw people into a more active and aware relationship with it through sensory techniques and the reactivation of historical practices and sites. My ongoing research proposes that the early-1900s alpine air cure sanatorium functions as a utopian eco-human-hybrid technology; through a regimen of landscape and climate immersion, it elicits curative effects by establishing a therapeutic relationship between the convalescent and the environment.

During a recent visit to the former air cure centre Kurhaus Alpenblick in Switzerland I assumed the role of an air cure climate convalescent. Documenting my daily sensory experience of the air on the Kurhaus terrace, I produced an atmospheric carte du jour. Framed within the diegetic context of a passage quoted from a 1911 publication, the resulting Kurhaus Alpenblick Air Tasting Menu presents a multisensory account of atmospheric phenomena integrated through the structure of enologist Emile Peynaud’s tasting method and the printed-matter form of a dining menu.

Distributed in the present-day Berghotel Alpenblick’s restaurant, the Air Tasting Menu introduces guests to the local alpine air as a source of nourishment worthy of the same attention that they might dedicate to the fare served from the hotel kitchen. The menu serves intuitively within the Alpenblick’s guest services to draw a sensory connection to the establishment’s largely forgotten institutional past. In doing so, it suggests that the experience of a health culture prior to the dominance of internal medicine practices—a time when the health of the individual and the health of the environment were considered inseparable—is still accessible to the senses today.

See the full tasting menu HERE: