Ulrike Bohnet has been fascinated by valuable, rare materials from nature for as long as she can remember. She became interested in ancient peoples long before she began to study ethnology. Since then, she has travelled through the vastness of the East and is particularly fascinated by the natural materials of indigenous peoples in Siberia and the Far East. Alongside fish leather, Swiss stone pine nuts (kedr) and much more, birch bark has been her warmest and softest encounter in the vastness of the taiga.
But Ulrike is not only devoted to the Scythians, Tuvans and Evenks, Nanai, Chukchi and Nenets; as a cultural mediator and museum curator, she also has many years of experience in being in constant dialogue with „normal“ modern Germans, Swiss, Georgians, Russians and globetrotters. Her lectures and courses, exhibitions and performances transport us to an otherworldly world and make our everyday existence seem like a dream.
When the employee of the Stuttgart Lindenmuseum was appointed co-curator of the exhibition »Shamans of Siberia. Magician - Mediator - Healer« went in search of valuable treasures from nature, contact with sagaan was the natural consequence.
In 2012, Uli finally worked together with Tim the concept, Experience workshops The programme enables participants to work independently with the material of infinite possibilities, birch bark, and to learn everything they need to know about the origin of the bark.
After several stays in Russia, e.g. for field research in Tuva/South Siberia, for ethnological museum work in Petersburg and Khabarovsk, Ulrike returned to the Far East in 2012 to experience the taiga as an artist during a kind of „artist without residence“ and to realise it artistically. Of course, she also went hunting for old birch bark artefacts and almost lost knowledge about them.
Ulrike likes to fight the swarms of Siberian mosquitoes and horseflies with black birch tar, which smells like road construction.