A Walk with Rahel Kesselring

Like the turn of a season or the approach of a cat, the Fondation Beyeler comes up on you slowly. Shielded from the road by a wall, the museum building reveals itself over a series of grassy rises and slopes. Sunken directly into the ground, it looks like a geological emanation, or something growing from roots in the earth. When Ernst Beyeler — the Swiss art dealer and collector who with his wife, Hildy, founded the institution that bears their name — commissioned the building from architect Renzo Piano in 1991, an intrinsic part of his brief was that the art and nature should be in harmony. In Riehen, the village near Basel where Beyeler lived in most of his life, a site was found: the former private park of an eighteenth-century summer retreat. In 1997, Piano remarked upon the park’s “venerable trees”. Today, they grow alongside planted borders, tended lawns and a shallow pool, laden with lily pads, which gently laps against the glass panes which form the building’s southern facade.

These are the grounds that Rahel Kesselring has walked every day, since she became the Fondation Beyeler’s first ever Chanel Botanical Curator in 2025. Jointly appointed by the Fondation Beyeler and Chanel Culture Fund, the post is responsible for developing both public programming in these grounds and a conservation plan for the resident flora and fauna. Yet, being brand new and sui generis, it’s also a role that doesn’t come with an atlas or a roadmap. For Kesselring, five months into the post, that sense of exploration and possibility is precisely what’s so exciting. “I am trying to understand as much as possible of the history of the site,” she says, “to read everything I can that relates to it, to talk to the people who know a lot about the garden — or find out who they might be.”

This commitment to the new and uncharted drives the work of the Chanel Culture Fund, explains Yana Peel, President of Arts, Culture & Heritage at Chanel. “We champion artists and culture institutions that are pushing boundaries,” she says, “ones that are aspiring to innovate, expanding public imagination, and really focussing on what matters most: namely, what’s coming next.” Describing the fund’s model of cultural patronage as “non-transactional, non-commercial and enabled by independence.” Peel emphasises that the approach is needs-based, born of consultation with cultural institutions to find ways to grow their own missions. Joining Chanel in 2020, Peel quickly established that “the best thing we could do is ask a brilliant director what is needed in an institution and then together come up with something that can move the dial.” Hence, the initiatives that flow from these dialogues — currently 42 projects across 15 countries over 5 continents — are as varied as the institutions and their cultural ecosystems themselves: from the first public library dedicated to art at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art to a residency for women artists at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. They are projects conceived with the next generation in mind, Peel says. “We are planting trees whose shade we won’t even see.”

The house’s founder herself may have approved of the metaphor. Working with architect Peter Marino, the fund has just overseen a meticulous, five-year restoration of La Pausa, Chanel’s private villa on the Côte d’Azur; it is surrounded, Peel emphasises, by hundreds of olive trees. One particularly magnificent example stands in front of the villa’s main door: Chanel decided to keep this tree rooted in place, Peel explains, leaving her guests to navigate around it before entering. For Chanel at La Pausa, “there was a primacy of nature,” Peel adds.

One strand of Chanel Culture Fund’s activities has been the creation of curatorial positions with dedicated missions: devoted to expanding representation of women artists at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and fostering historic and contemporary moving image, at Hong Kong’s M+ museum. Thus, “when Sam Keller [Fondation Beyeler’s Director] suggested that appointing a Botanical Curator would enable the Fondation Beyeler to really go far outside the gallery walls,” Peel explains. “This was a very welcome evolution.” “And then the search led us to Rahel, whose practice was so aligned, and who was really thinking about nature in this 360-degree way, weaving it into the core of the programme.”

When she saw the listing for the post, Kesselring agrees, she was immediately drawn to its emphasis on “the botanical” as a field of understanding. “It wasn’t for a curator of plants, but a botanical curator,” she emphasises – explaining that for her this refers “not only to the plants themselves, but also to the knowledge systems around them. That is, not just what we know of plants, but how we think about them. And in turn, perhaps, how this thinking might change how we think about ourselves, too.” Part of Kesselring’s remit is to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, creating new perspectives out from and back onto the botanical field. She enthusiastically cites a passage from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) about the pollination interaction between a wasp and an orchid, explaining how it embodies the philosophers’ concepts of “becoming” and “reterritorialisation”. She also tells me about botanical models for rethinking concepts of gender and queerness: how some plants switch between sexual and asexual reproduction; how some flowers contain both male and female organs, while others open twice in a season: once as male, once as female.

Kesselring’s recent research has made her open to this kind of deep reorientation in thinking. “Before coming here, I was working in an interdisciplinary research lab of ‘Matters of Activity’ at Humboldt University in Berlin,” she explains. “Everything was centred around the question of new materials and how to change our perception of them. Like, ‘How would it be possible to give a material agency?’ Or, ‘What happens if we give agency to plants?’” For decades now, champions of ecology in the “Rights of Nature” movement have sought to grant legal “personhood” to aspects of the natural world. In New Zealand, for example, the whole of the Whanganui River, from the mountains to the sea, was acknowledged by law in 2017 as Te Awa Tupua: an indivisible, living entity with “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person.” This approach is not uncontested, and its ramifications can sometimes seem almost too vast to envisage: to consider them, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane argues in Is a River Alive? (2025), requires: “unlearning, a process much harder than learning.” Harder, Kesselring I think would agree, but still essential.

“The new season is just starting,” Kesselring observes, when we meet at the Fondation Beyeler on a bright, cold day in early spring. Indeed, it is early both in Kesselring’s tenure and in the botanical year; the shape of her plans for the Fondation Beyeler and the park’s flowers are still developing, underground. Nevertheless, as we walk around, signs of flowering come into view: a clump of Bergenia, with their rhubarb-y red stems, a shower of white camellias being cooed over by visitors, and the petals of a magnolia in bud, the candelabra-like twists of its branches rhyming with the arms of the Alexander Calder painted steel mobile that towers behind it. Part of the collection since its inception, this work, The Tree (1966), is sited in proximity to the Fondation Beyeler’s in progress extension into the adjoining historic park, a move which will almost double the grounds in size and welcome three new buildings by Peter Zumthor. It’s when Kesselring talks about this next chapter that the full scope of her conception of curating botanically comes into view. Gesturing towards the new grounds, she describes how planning for the extended parkland is an opportunity “to centre or foster discussion around plants” in the life of the Fondation Beyeler, opening questions that are both concrete and practical — “How often are the plants cut? How will we prepare this or that area in spring?” — but will also have far-reaching impact on the park’s future development. “I think the curatorial needs to go deeper than doing programming or planting,” Kesselring says. “For me, it needs to become structural. And then it it’s about making long-term decisions, though they may not be immediately visible if you come to the garden as a visitor.” As an example, she tells me excitedly that the renewal of the grounds’ Parkpflegewerk — a document that secures the analysis of a park and acts a kind of binding manual for its care — is coming up. “It’s extremely bureaucratic,” she concedes, “but at the same time extremely interesting to me to be part of that development, which will be crucial for the future ecological development of the park.”

Kesselring was born in Switzerland 1987, though, from her own account, she’s something of a wanderer. Growing up in Bern, before Berlin, she was living in Zurich, Vienna, Beirut and Frankfurt. “Very much a mountain landscape person,” she’s always enjoyed being in nature. Living in Basel, she relishes taking hikes on the weekend, though she tends not to do these alone anymore, since her preference is for the “more remote and dangerous” routes. Like much of her research, hiking, Kesselring reflects, is about changing perception. Up on an Alpine trail, “the slow movement enhances your perception.” She enjoys nighttime in the park for the same reason. “The eyes usually have the front position in perception, but in darkness the other senses are more activated: sound and smell are more perceivable.” Her favourite times of day — at the Fondation Beyeler, or indeed anywhere outdoors are dawn and twilight, “when you have the light changes and the perception of time changes.” At dusk, the Fondation Beyeler’s park is still full of life: Kesselring tells me it’s home to four different species of bat.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Kesselring’s favourite spot at the Fondation Beyeler is also on the threshold. By the wall edging the north side of the grounds, chairs are positioned to take in the view. “I love this location, because on the one hand you’re in the park, but you can also see these areas beyond which are totally different, territories where totally different rules apply.” Indeed, as we look out, Kesselring points out a line of wild blackberry, growing up a fence that edges an orchard of blossoming cherry trees and an abutting field, planted with corn. Beyond stands a screen of trees, some strung with clumps of bird nests, bordering the recreational area that runs alongside the channel of the river Wiese. On the horizon, a hill indicates the first swell of the Black Forest, its slope half-trellised by vineyards. It’s a tapestry of land uses, testimony to a history of different intentions and decisions, large and small. This is part of what makes lowland Switzerland so uniquely interesting an environment, Kesselring suggests: “You won’t find a square centimetre that hasn’t had a human touch. That’s what makes it this very complexly shaped landscape.” For Kesselring, having a history of inhabitation and adaptation doesn’t make a landscape any less “authentic”, but rather only more fascinating. The word “culture”, she emphasises, coming from the Latin colere, originally relates to practices tending to plants. The implication is that there is no hard and fast dichotomy between the wild and the tamed: that nature and culture are always intertwined.

“Artists around the world are engaging with the natural world,” reflects Sam Keller, the Fondation Beyeler’s Director since 2008, by email. This dialogue, he adds, “has long been central to our programme”: indeed, in 1998, Christo and Jeanne Claude wrapped 178 trees around the site in fabric and rope, a gesture of protection that also made each living specimen simultaneously a sculpture. More recently, in 2021 Olafur Eliasson removed the museum’s facade, so the outdoor pond flooded inside; in 2024, Precious Okoyomon tended a greenhouse, replete with plants, butterflies and an animatronic sculpture. For Keller, the appointment of the Chanel Botanical Curator is “a new chapter that expands this legacy and acknowledges that the conservation of culture and nature are intertwined.” “Our responsibility is not only to preserve and present art,” he says, “but to care for the whole ecology of this place.”

At the end of our walk, Kesselring takes me to another cherished spot — at the eastern edge of the Fondation Beyeler, where the land slopes down again to a pond, fringed with reeds. At its centre is Thomas Schütte’s bronze Hase (2013): a slightly melancholy hare, its mouth gushing a jet of water; behind it, the grass bears a sheen of speedwells and daisies. In the tranquil air, dozens of bees weave in and out of a pair of hives, nestled under trees. One suggested origin for the name Beyeler, as it happens, is an old Swiss German word meaning “beekeeper”. At this moment, the Fondation Beyeler and the hives seem connected by the hum of unseen, unhurried activity: inside both of them, the work of transformation is underway. §