ELSA SCHARRER

 Elsa Schärrer was born in Geneva in 1999. She studied philosophy and modern French at the UNIL (Lausanne), before a master's degree in creative writing at the HKB (Bern) and La Cambre (Brussels). She has just finished writing her first novel. She has also taken part in the creation of a poetry magazine for young authors. Furthermore, she is passionate about literature and textual analysis in general. She also studied dramatic art for many years at the Geneva Conservatory and enjoys performing her readings. Indeed, she believes that oral reading is the only way to truly offer the text in its entirety. In Brussels, she has taken part in numerous public readings, notably of her current text.

Artist Statement

Elsa Schärrer’s work is first and foremost a search for resonances, melodies and images. She shapes her writing like a score, reading and rereading sentences until they flow. Like river water. And like a river, the eddies come, but the plot is never the main thing. The narrative is perhaps just an excuse. An excuse, or the canvas from which silence can emerge. For this is also the great quest: to trace its contours.

One winter’s night, Alma walks along, the muffled sound of snow guiding her to a kebab shop. There she meets Emer, who is so different from her, but who, she believes, looks at the world in a certain way, in an informal way, as if before the words. Because a few more things appear when he’s around. But this is neither love nor friendship; what binds them together is this relationship with the world and the feeling that they speak together through it. Each will run away from where they grew up because they want to live without moderation. Their journeys will lead them to explore the limits of the world and their own solitudes.

La montagne aura la couleur de la montagne appears as part of the CAP diploma festival. It’s a novel in which things seem to be crossed by an indefectible pneuma, which sometimes guides, sometimes loses. The gaze is the only sense that allows a true approach to reality, a gaze that is sometimes excessive, crushing and elevating those who use it.