Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin)

Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) is a book of landscape imagery by Batia Suter, made from her 2019 solo exhibition at the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland and published by Roma Publications with the Musée de Bagnes, Le Châble.

For the exhibition Suter worked from her growing archive of scanned landscape images, which had already played a part in Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (2016). Roma says many of the images show wastelands and shift between romantic and menacing views. Suter overlays them so that unlike geological and biological settings join into composite landscapes. In sequence, the book reads as a journey that Roma places between an odyssey, a safari and paradise. The title comes from hexameter, the verse form of Homer’s Odyssey, and Mont-Voisin, the exhibition’s title, echoes spellings used by eighteenth and nineteenth century travelers for Mauvoisin. Suter and Roger Willems designed the book.

Suter is based in Amsterdam and Eglisau, Switzerland. Roma has also published her Parallel Encyclopedia #2, which follows a first Parallel Encyclopedia of 2007, and two books tied to exhibitions in 2018 and 2019: Radial Grammar at Le Bal in Paris and Cloud Service, an index of clouds and cloud-like forms, at Printed Matter in New York.