“If you opened people up, inside you would find landscapes,” said Agnès Varda. In the case of Tyrolean metal sculptor Alois Schild, this landscape would be the wild current of the Brandenberger Ache that has shaped his artistic work since the early 1980s – a rushing river carrying flotsam, stories and visions in its flow. From natural finds and relics of civilisation, Schild first created assemblages, then sculptures, performances and entire sculpture landscapes. From his base in the village of Kramsach, he has over decades unfolded a richly diverse artistic universe – from a sculpture park on the banks of the Brandenberger Ache river to bodies of work that have found resonance far beyond the Tyrolean Alps. His ‘Body Machines’ – radical entanglements of human and mechanic elements – explore the questions of freedom, technology and vulnerability, while other series reflect, with humour, playfulness and poetry, on the relationship between nature, history and the present. Illusion Reserves brings together four decades of sculptural practice and offers a compelling insight into Schild’s artistic vision. A book that represents art as a space of experience – raw, contradictory, charged with energy, and always in dialogue with the world.