rüffer&rub visionär / Every Drop Counts. Ernst Bromeis
or elsewhere. The famous artist couldn’t understand me.
The reason for my lack of local patriotism may well be that I am not a “genuine” resident of the Engadine. My blood does not bear the local hues of yellow and blue flowing in the veins of those who have been living in this region for centuries. Both my father’s family (the Bromeis clan) and that of my mother (the Hateckes) hailed from Germany. They migrated to Switzerland, and did so without cultivating a nostalgia for their original homeland.
So perhaps it was not surprising that I wanted to “emigrate” from the Engadine, that I wanted to get away from its constricting patriotism and self-love. And this “getting away” spewed out of me in a flood of energy and aggression. The object of this aggression was never directed at the other residents of the area—or at anyone else. I respected the lives being led by the population of Ardez, Bos-cha, Guarda and other communities in the area. The aggression was directed inwards—against myself. These feelings were not to be borne. To get relief from this accumulating heap of aggressive feelings, I tried (and still try) to transform it into positive, creative energy.
I was still light-years away from coming up with the “blue miracle”. After having completed my degree in physical education, having been certified as trainer, and having worked as such, I launched upon something new. I became an executive in the tourist industry. My new job was to serve as a manager for athletic and other events staged in the city of Lenzerheide. This caused me to follow the Rhine up towards its source, and to thus return to Graubünden.
My years working in the tourism industry were marked by my gathering of professional experience in dealing with the business sector. A key discovery was that of the world of communication. This represents a core skill of tourism destinations, as it enables them to successfully position themselves on the market. During my years, I helped shape the communication and positioning of Lenzerheide as a destination for cyclists and cross-country skiers. I was also charged with the management of athletic events. These responsibilities taught and showed me a lot. The quintessence of my experience is summed up in the phrase “The world needs nobody to help it spin. Everybody else requires the skills of communicators.”
After several years of working in this field, I decided it was time to seek a new challenge—which I found in the world of media. Another possibility would have been to work as a consultant for the Swiss Olympic bid. This would have given me national exposure.
I decided not to go for the above options, but rather for one enabling me to stay in the vicinity of Chur. This was because Cornelia and I had gotten married and had had children, and these, in turn, helped shape our lives.
The next step in my career was a short stint at RTR Radio e Television Rumantscha, the Rhaeto-Romanic broadcaster. Although brief, my tenure as a radio journalist was very important for my career and my life. This was because my new job caused me to realize that I would prefer to proactively shape events—rather than reporting on them. This job—though brief—did have its advantages. I was put in touch with a large number of news channels, with these ranging from the ANR Romanic-language broadcaster to SDA (Switzerland’s Reuters).
My reporting provided me with a fundamental insight. Water was becoming a hotter and hotter topic in the media. This applied to both the local and global levels. This insight, in turn, caused me to realize that I wanted to be a driver of and not a reporter on such topics as the melting of glaciers, the growing scarcity of water, and climate change.
My years of working in the worlds of athletic training, tourism and the media turned out to be my apprenticeship for what took place in autumn 2005. Until that time, I was not sure where I wanted to go. The years were marked by my inner uncertainties. My interior life was full of tumult. One thing that I was certain of: I wanted to create something all my own. I wanted a project upon which I could possibly work for the rest of my life, a project that would provide me with fulfillment, a fulfillment stemming from the realization of a vision worthy of a life’s dedication.
This ambition to create something bearing my signature and affirming my identity is one of my obsessions. It is also the obsession of an artist who wishes to devote herself or himself to creativity to the point of experiencing suffering for it and beyond.
People who know me from the media view me as a swimmer who gets from point A to point B by engaging in this sport, and as someone “playing” being an ambassador for water. I see myself as someone undertaking projects, be they on land or on water, be they involving art installations or physical performance.
Each of these projects is a fragment of something that will hopefully reveal itself to be a whole at the end of my life. This entity—this “blue miracle”—will then be able to be perceived as a work of art—as a self-sufficient entirety.
Reinhold Messner is a legendary adventurer. The books that he has written about his feats inspired me to go my own way. One of these feats was Messner’s Arctic expedition. While recounting it, Messner mentions that he can’t swim.3 This “footnote” became the key to my project. “Eu noud intuorn il muond”—“I will swim around the world” in Rhaeto-Romanic —was my first thought. That’s it! This would enable me to depart from my standard routes, to not have to follow others’ wakes, to set my own course around the world. This new plan liberated me from the past by showing me literally the way to go, the way to transform items that had been oppressing me into sources of strength.
From that moment on, I looked at the world in new ways. I scanned it for ways to realize my plan, which I found so exciting that I couldn’t sleep at night. I pored over the atlas, trying to map waterways taking me around the world. This search reached its climax during my family’s vacation in autumn 2005. which was spent at the mountainous village of Hasliberg, which is located in central Switzerland.
No electronic devices—neither Internet-linked computers nor smartphones nor televisions—disturbed our holidays, during which it rained all the time. During the vacation’s nights, while the rest of my family was fast asleep, I would get out of bed to peruse maps of the world. Whilst doing such, I would hear the rain gently tapping on the windows, through which a weak light came, illuminating the waterways that I had found on the maps. I kept all of this searching a secret. It was simply a dream, a crazy idea of mine.
I gradually realized that my life would not permit me to realize the idea of swimming around the world. Doing such would cause me to not see my family for years on end. How could I possibly earn a living during this time? How would others see the situation? I started running through the criticism to come through my mind.
But the idea of a project involving swimming had grabbed me. There was no way of getting away from it. My objective was to achieve a Utopia. And I needed a vision that would get me there, a vision that I could realistically expect to realize.
I started looking for other projects involving swimming— and found the answer in the largest lakes in the world. In contrast to the highest summits in the world, which have all been climbed, the world’s largest lakes have yet to be discovered by swimmers. These bodies of fresh water include Asia’s Lake Baikal, Lake Victoria in Africa, Lake Titicaca in South America, the Great Lakes in North America, a variety of small-sized lakes in Oceania, and Lake Ladoga, which is located north of St. Petersburg, and which is the largest fresh water lake in Europe.
The more I studied the atlas, the stronger that I perceived the blue it contains, and the less the colors of its land masses. I have retained this focus to this very day. The first things I notice nowadays when consulting a map are the blue lines and expanses it contains. My way of perceiving the world is that of someone looking at a negative, in which the gaps between solids strike the eye. I have retained this 180° reversal of perception to this very day.
The large lakes—the “sweet seas” as I refer to them—occupied my mind throughout the entire winter of 2006/2007, and into the spring beyond.
It was spring and I was in Chur, a city in eastern Switzerland, when inspiration struck me. I was drinking my coffee— as usual unsweetened—and was regarding the unopened bags of sugar provided to me. The bags were illustrated with maps of Switzerland, its cantons—and its lakes. In the small maps’ tiny scale, my canton of Graubünden