Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz

My practice unfolds between the fields of visual arts, publishing, teaching, translating, and research.

It is dedicated to activating the po(ï)etic potential of language.

It focuses on writing as a situated, embodied and embedded practice.

It moves between languages, genres, texts, and disciplines.

It relies on practices of bodily presence, attentiveness, sensing, and caring.

It involves collective thinking and embodied reflection.

It unfolds in relation to other beings, both human and other-than-human.

It combines a critical approach to questioning dominant normative systems with a creative exploration of alternative ways of (un)making sense.

It seeks to activate sustainable relationalities.


I like to think of it as a practice of worlding

DEARS

2020-ongoing

together with Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Robert Steinberger, and many others.

DEARS is a platform for writing practices at the crossroads of poetry, art and experimental writing.

DEARS promotes writing practices that navigate in-betweenness and rely on fluidity, hybridity, and multiplicities to explore situated modes of expression.

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine DEARS magazine salon des dispersexs Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine EXC librairie

practice sharing

"Practice sharing" invites both the sharing of practice and the practice of sharing. Ever since I have been made aware of this twofold meaning at a meeting of the Language bases artistic research group, the term has stayed with me: its polysemy tickles me.

WITHING

2023-present

with Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Emma Cocker, Laressa Dickey, Sabina Holzer, Ines Marita Schärer, Litó Walkey

WITHING is an ongoing, durational and collaborative project situated in the field of language-based artistic
research. Conducted by an international group of six women artists, writers, performers & researchers, the project is dedicated to collectively exploring the intra-action between bodying and languaging.

withing Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Language based artistic research practice sharing withing Delphine Chapuis Schmitz language based artistic research practice sharing withing language based artistic research Delphine Chapuis Schmitz withing language based artistic research Delphine Chapuis Schmitz

Voicing textualities

series of performative readings, 2015-open ended

you can find a complete list of my performative readings here.


Over the years I have been invited to write and perform texts in different contexts, in museums, in art centres, in a library, in the grocery store of a mountain village... The texts performed are polyphonic textualities that move between languages. They are all written in and for the specific situation of their performance.

Between languages

here is a list of published translation

Moving between French, English, and German on a daily basis, translating is at the core of my practice.
Since 2009, I have participated in numerous translation projects across a range of contexts, including academic, literary, artistic, and other fields.

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Zhdk translating Delphine Chapuis Schmitz translating

To become many

2025-ongoing

together with Sophie Lapalu, Marie Adjedj, Nicole Bachmann, Michèle Martel, Aurélia Defrance, Laura von Niederhäusern, and others.

To become many is a long-term translating project gathering a group of women artists and academics around a shared practice of translating.

BECOMING ONE:OTHERS

2021
installative work and a series of performances by Ilya Borisov, Daria Kucher, Anna Mayrova, Yulia Platonova 

in the context of the exhibition How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found again, curated by Ekaterina Shcherbakova at Typographia, Center for Contemporary Art, in Krasnodar (RU).

What does it mean to be many? How are we to become hybrid? How do we emerge as subjects from the relational mesh we are part of? How to relate to one another as non-unitary subjects? Such questions were at the core of the project Becoming one:others, which has been carried through in Fall 2021 in the framework of the exhibition How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found again at Typographia, Center for Contemporary Art, in Krasnodar (RU).

The Quest

The Quest

22,5×30,5 cm, 160 pages, edition of 250 copies, with a text by Geraldine Tedder, designed by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Guillaume Mojon. published by backbonebooks, berlin, 2019
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Delphine Chapuis Schmitz sifted Christoph Schifferli’s collection on artists’ books, selected single words and sentences. Isolated and not longer attached to a context, the words were combined anew to verses, the verses placed on pages (…) The quest is on appropriation in writing, on sources no longer, on content through form. On poetry. Concealing, unveiling: A quest suggests change, is often allegorical, a plot divide to introduce momentum into a narrative. (…) A livre à venir, now become. (Geraldine Tedder)

A Throw of the Dice

A Throw of the Dice

Online publication & on site installation

with texts by Bérénice Serra, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Jana Vanecek, Shelby Stuart

conceived and curated by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, 2020-2022

This project is part of the interdisciplinary research project "There is Something Wrong With My Hands. Oh Yes, They're Not Holding You". It consists in a series of commissioned texts published as a digital zine here.
In July 2022, an installative presentation of "A Throw of the Dice" took place at LIteraturhaus LIchtenstein, together with a collective reading of the text "Digital Fatigue in 11 Tableaux".

birth (for Elisa)

board book
12 pages, color offset
eeeditions, zurich, 2023

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In Birth (for Elisa), organic shapes in fluorescent watercolours are playfully combined with “primary” sounds. The decal letters and splashes of colour that evolve over the pages evoke the first moments of a form coming to life – or is it a life taking shape? While open to interpretation and personal reading, the book echoes a conceptual and a visual birth, as it is the first to be released by eeeditions.