Three hundred years ago, what is today Hotel Bad Ratzes was founded as a mineral bath, a place where especially local farmers came to recover from the hard physical demands of alpine agriculture. Scientists from across Europe passed through to study the unique flora of the Seiser Alm; travellers wrote about it in letters and travelogues. It was, from the beginning, a place where landscape and human life were deeply intertwined.

Hotel Bad Ratzes invited us to mark this anniversary not with a celebration, but with a conversation. The resulting exhibition drew on several narrative threads, the mineral bath origins, the scientific expeditions, the slow transformation into a place of hospitality, and unfolded across a series of circular clearings cut into the historic meadows. The landscape itself became the frame: minimal intervention, maximum presence.

The final section shifted register: an open, interactive space for reflection and collective discussion about the future of tourism in South Tyrol, and about what it means to inhabit and care for a landscape over centuries.

History,
Landscape,
Future

There cannot be a quieter corner of the world. Here man has learned to rebel against nature and build those “grand hotels” that surprise the traveller with eaux chaudes and eaux bonnes. Long may the shadows of the Schlern fall on nothing more artificial than this humble roof hidden under the dark spruces!

Excerpt from travelogue by George C. Churchill, 1860