Text by Nell Whittaker

If you are a cow in Switzerland, you will spend your summers high in the mountains, feasting on summer grass. In the autumn, the cows are brought down from the peaks in a festival called Alpabzug in German or Désalpe in French, and paraded through the village with their heads wreathed in flowers and bells. On this day, Swiss children smoke Stumpen, small brown Swiss cigars, in a ceremony not only tolerated but encouraged by adults. The smoking comes to represent the adult responsibilities of the children, and their success in bringing their cows to the cusp of another winter. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but sometimes it’s a potent symbol of adulthood, as framed through agricultural triumph.

The artist Kris Lüdi spent his summers with his grandparents in Appenzell, a town at the foot of the Alpstein mountains, and saw the child smokers as a child himself. Now, his book Smoke (2026) provides an extreme close-up perspective of this strange tradition. As the face of a young girl disappears behind a cloud of smoke, so too does the immaterial distance between our era and an older one, between young and old, against the Alps and the imperceptible shift from summer to winter. .