Landscape around Imli House

Garden plan at Imli House by Varsha Nair

Orto garden at HSLU, Lucerne. Map by Hannah Beilharz

Orto X Baroda is a collective activity focused on reconnecting with the natural environment, an artistic exchange between three women artists.

Orto is an urban garden that began as a collaborative project between Australian artist Hannah Beilharz and Italian artist Daniela Ardiri, and is located in Lucerne, Switzerland; Baroda is artist Varsha Nair's garden in India.

The project uses audio recordings, texts and drawings to develop a sense of interrelatedness between the different experiences of our gardens. The work reflects on our emotional and personal connections to the life cycles of our local ecologies, the weather, the changing seasons and how we understand ourselves in relation to these shifting patterns in the context of rapid climate change.

Audio exchanges, as an autoethnographic tool, frame place and self in place and allow us to update each other on what is currently happening in our garden spaces and what we dream of or imagine for these spaces in the future.

The recordings reveal a sense of intimacy, display a different time scale, exploring the slowed down and deeper time of ecology as an artistic method.

In this exchange, these are some of the questions we are exploring: How can we develop a sense of belonging in the rapidly shifting landscapes of the climate crisis?What does gardening as an artistic practice offer for imagining futures with and beyond climate crisis?


2022 - ongoing



Hannah Beilharz is an Australian multi-disciplinary artist and poet based between Naarm (Melbourne), and Berlin, Germany. She is currently working on an artistic research project exploring the transformative potential of ecological grief and meaning of home within climate crisis, undertaken from 2021-2024 in Lucerne, Switzerland as part of the Master of Art in Public Spheres pro- gram at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

Daniela Ardiri is a Sicilian artist currently studying a Master of Art in Public Spheres in Lucerne, Switzerland. She is conducting research on the kitchen as a public space, investigating contem- porary feminist practices in the arts in parallel with her personal history. Her artistic practice is expressed through drawing, paint- ing, ceramics, bronze, fabric, photography, and performance.

Varsha Nair is an artist based in Baroda, India. She mentors at Lucerne University, where she is also invited to collaborate by Orto and is growing a garden near Pavagadh hills outside Baroda. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda, India. Inviting multidisciplinary collaborations her work encompasses various approaches and genres, including bringing people and things together. She is the co-organizer of Womanifesto – an international art exchange in Thailand, and has also exhibited internationally. 

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