T H U N D E R S T O R M

In Thunderstorm, French-German artist Marie Sutter reanimates the former Franck-Areal silo in Basel—a space once filled with the warm, bitter scent of roasted chicory root. Today, it holds a different atmosphere: suspended time, charged stillness, and the quiet tension of memory.

Above, a single line of light floats—serene, until it is fractured. Sudden, visceral flashes tear through the space, accompanied by a thunderclap that crashes into the body more than the ear. It is loud. It is violent. For a moment, the storm dominates—uncontainable, electric, unrelenting. And then, almost imperceptibly, it recedes.

In the aftermath, a soundscape begins to unfold: low, breath-like, cyclical. Chicory flowers flicker onto the walls in soft spectral blue—ephemeral, between bloom and storm. A voice emerges. Time seems to stretch.

Below, rows of Cichorium intybus—chicory plants—reach upward, cultivated over months under deep red light. The choice is both biological and symbolic: red stimulates root growth, anchoring resilience below the surface, while evoking warmth, urgency, and emotional gravity.

Once processed here into a dark, caffeine-free coffee during wartime scarcity, the chicory root returns—not as commodity, but as witness. Not to be consumed, but to be felt.

It stands in the space as a living trace of endurance—a quiet force long overlooked.

Why chicory? Why a thunderstorm?

Because resilience often begins in the dark, beneath pressure. And in a world bracing for upheaval, it is the overlooked that often carries us through.

A 30-minute composition by Sutter threads together storm, breath, voice, and time—an arc that moves from rupture to reckoning, from noise to presence.

Thunderstorm is not just the calm before the storm—it is the storm’s release and the stillness that follows. A meditation on thresholds, on what it means to withstand impact, and on the power of returning—not broken, but changed.

Sometimes, it is the forgotten that returns with the loudest force.