How KiefferWoodtli Turn Tree and Solar Data into Art

KiefferWoodtli, the Swiss Artist Duo Translating Nature into Sound and Sculpture

A Japanese Pagoda Tree stands in a garden, and beside it a screen shows what the tree is doing.Sap moves, light shifts, a sensor reads both, and the image and the sound change with them.

The visuals are hand-painted rather than photographic.

That is Arboreal Serenade, first presented at Art Basel 2025 and now part of the permanent collection of the Enea Tree Museum, and it sets the terms for the works that followed. Data arrives as a number

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The Swiss duo Sara Kieffer and Lucien Woodtli, based in New York, seem unwilling to leave those signals as numbers.

The data belongs to the tree. What the work asks is what kind of listening belongs to us.

In Arboreal Serenade, the visuals and the sound were hand-painted and composed by Kieffer, then tied to the tree's live signals, so that the measured and the intuited run on the same clock.

Arboreal Severance, commissioned by the Cultural Department of Swissnex for Climate Week New York City 2025, turns the same method against itself.

The source is a 101-year-old Japanese Pagoda Tree in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, whose sap flow, photosynthesis and respiration become a breathing soundscape. When visitors enter, the sound fractures.

In the installation view, speakers climb a white column almost like branches, and black cables run from them across the floor to cracked concrete blocks, soil scattered along the lines.

The artists describe the work as a rupture between humans and nature made perceptible, and the cables seem to say it plainly. The connection is physical, and it can be cut.

Their recent solo exhibition, AXES at Alvarez Chida in Mexico City, moved the data from the tree to the sun. NASA solar data shaped light and sound inside an elliptical installation, and the ellipse, a form held between two foci instead of one centre, became the model for the whole show.

Orientation, in this logic, is something negotiated again and again, never settled.

From 20 to 25 October, works from AXES travel to Paris as AXES:TOTUM, the duo's first solo show in the city, presented by Alvarez Chida at 23 Rue de Miromesnil.

The artists describe it as a larger system compressed "into a smaller space while retaining its internal relationships, forces, and tensions."

The exhibition brings together sculpture, drawing, sound, installation and performance. A movement performance is scheduled for the opening on 20 October at 7:30 pm, extending the duo's investigation of orientation into the movement of the body.

Whether orientation holds once the system is compressed is a question the room will have to answer.