Magazine

IN RESIDENCE — BETWEEN LANGUAGES CERVO

Mountain Resort, Zermatt — June 2026

I arrived with threads and my idea for a project, light as an intention: to embroider photographs, with the stories of the mountaineers — their climbs, their words, with the Matterhorn as a subject. Settled into the Essence Cabin, I unpacked my nomadic studio. A few days later, everything shifted — quietly, without a sound, like a pebble that rolls and takes a whole mountain slope down with it.

CERVO has its own motto: Beyond exploring. It carried me further than I could have imagined. Words matter to people in this line of work — maybe that's exactly why we end up working them, with thread or by other means. The mountain brought about a shift I hadn't planned for.

I found that same shift in the languages crossing here: German, French, Italian, English — several voices, several ways of saying the world. The philosopher Heinz Wismann's thinking stayed with me: between languages, rather than inside one. Translating is never simply replacing. Something resists in the passage; something also appears.

The same passage was waiting for me in writing itself: stitching a word is not writing it. Something is lost there. Something is born there too — on the other side.

The Matterhorn, meanwhile, was simply there — patient, unmoved. It's already represented everywhere, photographed to the point of exhaustion. So the task was no longer to represent it, but to give it a place some other way, within me. Its silhouette spread through the work: folded fabrics, stitched lines, threads as trajectories, pins as constellations, words pierced, reversed, translated. Table napkins folded themselves into a summit; coasters from the bar took on the shape of a Braille text. One piece born here carries an Italian title: Oltre l'esplorazione — Beyond exploration — the CERVO motto turned inside out, in embroidered words.

The thread then carried me back to an older discovery — to a line of Daumal's that never leaves me: that one could spend a lifetime untangling a single piece of string. One day, I turned an embroidery over. Front: words. Back: knots, crossings, trajectories, strange drawings — an almost extraterrestrial language. The writing was still there, only visible in another way — like a voice heard through a wall.

That discovery is what I pushed further here in Zermatt: perforated sheets, photographs, fabrics stitched together, reversed words, mirrors. As meaning slipped away, a structure appeared. A phrase came almost on its own: Language is woven.

From that weave, the thread led me to the fold. The mountain is made of folds. Fabric folds. Time, perhaps, folds too. To create, to write, is perhaps to fold time — so that one day, someone might unfold it.

From that fold, pushed to its tipping point, came what I never expected: Folding Light. A sheet of mirrored paper, under a ceiling light, folded, curved, moved, filmed. The reflected light began to draw on its own — shapes appearing, vanishing, impossible to control. I hadn't made an image. I had created the conditions for an apparition — a strange, almost living, even unsettling phenomenon, caught on film.

None of this would have been possible without the CERVO team — attentive, curious, present in a way that's rare. Their hospitality may have consisted, for me, in making possible the Beyond of my own project.

Thank you, dear CERVO — for the time, the space, the freedom, and this Beyond you know how to unfold so well, down to the smallest detail.

Until next time, Zermatt.

With love beyond ;)

Sophie Lavine — Sol