Leonardo Bürgi Tenorio
∗1994, Mexico/Switzerland
Leonardo Bürgi Tenorio (1994, Basel, Switzerland) is a Mexican-Swiss artist living in Basel. His artistic practice mainly consists of installations, sculptures, and drawings that address the relationship between humans and nature, natural and artificial, architectural spaces and natural environments, as well as growth and decomposition. In his installations, the artist employs a wide variety of materials, ranging from traditional artistic media—such as drawing or ceramics—often combined with organic elements like plants, soil, fungi, and other resources from the natural world, which might evolve or decompose over the course of the exhibition. In his recent works he has been working on the colonial background and connection between the Wardian case and the terrarium as an object for biological extraction and simultaneously as an projection surface for a romanticized ecology narrative.Bürgi Tenorio is active in the culinary field, developing installations and performances that begin with the sharing and production of food in order to address political, social, and cultural issues. The artist was part of the Kitchen Collective Hasoso from 2014 to 2022, whose members shared a common interest in culinary practices, performance, and political activism.
For Biennale Gherdëina 10, Bürgi Tenorio presents a group of drawings and adapted terrariums, originally developed for his exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland. These ready-made structures function as enclosed micro-environments, each containing a carefully arranged constellation of objects, materials, and organic references. For this presentation, the artist has reworked the terrariums through on-site research in Val Gardena, incorporating locally gathered elements, photographs and souvenirs. Each unit becomes a self-contained system, subtly adjusted in a juxtaposition to its new context while maintaining its artificial, constructed character.
Historically associated with the extraction, cultivation and display of exotic life, terrariums operate in the contemporary as ambivalent trivial devices: at once sites of care and control, intimacy and distance. Scaled down and enclosed, they offer a contained encounter with an imagery of nature—both proximate and mediated.
As a group, the works form a fragmented landscape of parallel worlds, where natural and cultural elements coexist in a fragile, unstable balance.
