Kunst is a series of black-and-white photographs showing painted inscriptions on natural backgrounds. It documents Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière’s ephemeral interventions in specific landscapes across Egypt, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, and Switzerland between 2012 and 2015. 
Indebted both to Land Art’s involvement with drawings in or marking of natural sites and to Conceptual Art’s insistence on the linguistic nature of all art propositions, each Kunst action consists of the apparent simple gesture of inscribing a single word in capital letters upon a piece of land, forest, mountain, or other natural site. The meaning of the chosen word always corresponds to the setting in which it is written. The giant letters “WIESE” mark a sloping field; “DUNE” marks a huge area of desert; “WALD” is scrawled across an expanse of fir trees marking the beginning of the forest; and the seven-meter-high letters “JUNGLE” describe the dense blanket of leaves and vines that form the background; etc. By superimposing the signifier on the signified through a style that echoes the logic of a graffiti, each Kunst intervention addresses the invasive act of claiming and labelling a landscape. Involving a range of logistical challenges, each intervention was carried out with the support of a large helping team including autonomously acting graffiti artists and fire extinguishers.