‘Dazzling Bubbles’ | 45 minutes with Christa Baumberger

Christa Baumberger, exhibition curator and Glauser expert, guides visitors through the exhibition and the worlds of fear created by Nando von Arb and Friedrich Glauser.

‘An invisible creature was sucking at me, growing, crouching in the pit of my stomach …’. The feeling that Glauser describes when looking back on his childhood is one that the illustrator Nando von Arb knows only too well from his own experience. In the graphic novel *Learning to Fear* (Edition Moderne 2023), he has captured his own fears and how he copes with them in vividly coloured stories: nocturnal monsters, the fear of illness and death, but also states of intoxication and therapies. For the exhibition, he has engaged with Glauser’s childhood memories for the first time and created multi-layered drawings based on them. On a guided tour with Christa Baumberger, we follow these powerful images of fear: a pyramid of dwarves, parents depicted as weeping willows, or Glauser in a pressure cooker – what story do they tell? What did childhoods marked by fear look like around 1900 and 2000, and how are today’s fears reflected in those of the past? And what do we carry with us from our own childhoods?

Christa Baumberger wrote her doctoral thesis on Glauser and was curator of his estate at the Literary Archives of the Swiss National Library from 2009 to 2018. She has been director of Litar since 2018. She has curated several exhibitions on Glauser and is the editor of the collection of letters ‘Everyone is looking for their paradise …’ (Limmat Verlag 2021).

The exhibition is open before and after the event: from 1 pm to 4 pm.

Download: Flyer ‘Schillernde Blasen’

Image: Christa Baumberger, Photo: © Ayse Yavas