There are probably not many people who think of yoga first when they hear “Brücke” and “Blauer Reiter”. The Buchheim Museum in Bernried has had a new press officer since the beginning of August, who is also a certified Iyengar yoga teacher. Still from Berlin, where she last lived as a freelancer, she came up with the accompanying program for the current exhibition “Bridge, Rider, Dog” and has since been offering yoga classes for stressed museum visitors.
Claudia Lamas Cornejo is convinced that “art and yoga have a lot in common”.
Longing for Bavaria
Born in Munich in 1983 to a German mother and a Peruvian father, Claudia Lamas Cornejo studied communication sciences in Bayreuth and culture and media management in Berlin. She helped set up the art institution “SAVVY Contemporary” in Berlin-Neukölln and headed the communications department of the “Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at Humboldt University until 2018. After that, she lived well as a freelance PR consultant and yoga teacher until the corona pandemic thwarted her plans: “Like most yoga teachers, I lost half of my students.” Because she also felt a longing for Bavaria, where her entire family lives, she applied for the position of press and public relations officer in Bernried.
“Improvisation Sinflut” is the name of this work by Wassily Kandinsky in the exhibition Brücke und Blaue Reiter in the Bauchheim Museum.
(Photo: Georgine Treybal)
“Work-life balance is very important to me,” she says, even before the conversation really gets going, and leads the visitor to the terrace next to her office, which is still bathed in the mild afternoon sun. The Buchheim Museum initially appealed to her, above all because of its wonderful location on the lake and in the middle of nature, she reports. However, when she was accepted just an hour after the interview and given an employment contract to sign, she felt completely taken by surprise: “I was shocked that I had ended my wonderful life in Berlin so radically.” After the first two months in Bernried, however, things look different – not least because of the perfect work-life balance. She has found an apartment in the middle of the old village of Bernried and likes to use the stand-up paddle board to get to the museum. She also kept the apartment in Berlin and works from there in the home office at times. When she’s in Bernried, she goes swimming with her boss during her lunch break, even now in the fall. “That’s where we have the best ideas,” she reports. Every Wednesday she practices yoga with the visitors of the museum. “Tree and Lotus” will be the name of the offer to match the “Women and Flowers” in the title of the next exhibition “Flores y Mujeres”.
The figure shows visitors the way to the Buchheim Museum in Bernried.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
She is the youngest member of the museum team, she says. She finds it very impressive that her predecessor Sabine Bergmann was there for 21 years – from the opening of the museum in 2001 until her retirement. Many of the other colleagues also knew the founder of the museum, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, personally. “Of course they have a lot more experience than I do,” says Lamas, “but I have the freedom not to let that influence me.” In her opinion, it’s good that she doesn’t “come from this orbit”: “An absolute fresh start was wanted.” And the yoga exercises are by far not the only innovation that she has introduced in the short time: “I try to establish something new everywhere.” According to their idea, the Buchheim Museum should soon become more international and more visible on the Internet. And of course the audience should be younger. She produces the videos for social media herself and also takes care of the website. “For me, the museum is much more than the Expressionist collection,” she says, “I see it as a complete experience.” And the founder of the museum would have liked that too – although you wouldn’t want to imagine what he would have said about “bridge, rider, dog”.