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Switzerland
Gisèle Münzner is a Swiss-based artist whose practice explores the intimate relationship between human emotion and water. Working primarily with handmade paper, she investigates the scientific concept of Lachrymology — a poetic theory that connects the cycles of water in nature with the inner liquids of the human body.
The connection she draws between natural and bodily waters is at once scientific and poetic. Oceans and lakes, rivers and the moon hold vast histories of time, while the smallest drop of a tear carries an equally deep personal history. Fog, rain, and snow move invisibly through air, just as emotions move silently through the body. Both systems are cycles of release and return.
Her artworks embody this theory through material gestures: layered stacks of paper resemble sedimented time; suspended sheets recall waterfalls, veils, or cascades of memory; raised fibers echo the marks of touch, scars, or tears. Light and shadow play a central role, extending the works into their surrounding space and reinforcing their fragility and impermanence.
Münzner’s practice is grounded in the belief that fragility is not weakness but resilience. Torn edges, lifted fibers, and the silence of paper become reminders of how both bodies and landscapes hold and transform experience. They open a space for viewers to encounter their own memories, their own inner tides, their own unspoken weight.
Through Lachrymology, Gisèle Münzner proposes that the human body and the natural world are not separate, but continuous. Every drop of rain, every tear, every ocean wave belongs to the same rhythm — a rhythm of release, memory, and renewal.
I approach paper as a living skin — a surface that breathes, absorbs, and remembers. Handmade paper is a body, carrying traces of time, topographies of experience, and the silent marks of emotional memory.My practice unfolds through water. I layer, soak, and re-wet, allowing fibers to dissolve or reawaken while gravity, light, and evaporation take part in the authorship. The transformations that emerge — curling edges, shifting textures, fragile holes — echo the way emotions mark us, how memory lingers and fades.At Loulé Criativo, I developed a series of works grounded in the idea that water is the condition for life — but never fully ours. Inspired by the lunar pull on tides, the oceans and tears alike, I explored how moisture in its many forms — breath, condensation, submersion — can turn paper into a reflective body. My papers behave like skin: vulnerable, reactive, marked by contact. I draw from the myth that water allowed us to live on Earth only under the condition that she would dwell within us. In this way, each sheet becomes both document and presence — a witness to cycles of longing, forgetting, and return.My artistic vocabulary is minimal, tactile, and slow. I work with paper and natural forces, where what disappears is as meaningful as what remains.Through Lachrymology — my poetic study of tears — I seek to reveal fragility not as weakness, but as strength: the capacity to absorb, to let go, to transform.
Thank you Loulé Criativo and Paper Lab Berlin for making this residency possible, and for creating a space where paper, ideas, and friendships could grow.My heartfelt gratitude to all the international artists I had the joy of sharing this journey with — Brenda @brendamalkinson-artist, Viviana @arqrunicos_colour, Vera @veramcevoy-artist, Jina @jinanebe, Isobel @isc-ceramica and Guy @guy.lougashi. Each of you brought inspiration, exchange, and a spirit of generosity that made this experience unforgettable.
Silent imprints of water
It has been 30 days. Fragility is strength.
It has been 30 days.
Silent imprints of water
Silent imprints of water
When Maps of Silence Begin to Fray.(layered, stitched, mixed textures — a cartography of traces, fragile yet insistent)
It has been 12 days. Water leaves its traces.
When Fragments Speak in Black and White. (graphic stitched piece, part grid, part blur — tension between order and dissolution)
When Shadows Bleed into Water. (dark indigo-dyed piece with stitching — evoking stains, depth, and fluid memory)
When Threads Refuse to Stay Silent. (stitched paper, tangled black threads, fragile perforations — like unspoken emotions surfacing)