Barns Barning

Melioration, machines, and a milk pipeline have left more than 600 barns in the Valsertal to the marmots - having lost their once full-time jobs of housing hay, sleeping children, and grunting animals. These unemployed structures have taken up sheltering of a different order, their lower bellies now home to spare parts and extra materials, their untended roofs becoming mountain mineral restaurants for moss and lichen. The barns, now moonlight as stoic empty icons, yet offer a host of possibilities. Practice research attunes to their specific rhythms by making with them as a process of growing, of listening, of touching, of dancing, of barning. This book embodies Lisa Lee Benjamin's practice, curation, and dwelling in the village of Vals, in Canton Graubünden.