This article continues the visual ethnography series using images and close observation to examine how people live, make meaning, and give those meanings form in practice. Please refer to the Index of Artscapes and Articles for other works that may be of interest.

For one week (5–12 August 2017), I attended the annual ‘intensive’ meditation and Buddhist philosophy study course taught by the Venerable Gonsar Rinpoche at the Centre des Hautes Etudes Tibétaines  at Le Mont-Pèlerin near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. There are many connections here with Mongolia, an important one is that the Venerable Geshe Lobsang Dayang Thubten Trinley lives here.

The campus is spread over two precincts above Vevey; Rabten Choeling and Les Tassonneyres. Along with many others, for a wonderful and intellectually challenging week, I was in residence there.

I shared a room with Ana-Marie Lordache, an energetic Romanian psychiatrist from Bucharest whose expressed therapeutic modality draws from the principles of inter-subjectivity. She recently established the first psychiatry-psychology clinic in Romania to specialise in trauma therapy—an innovator, to be sure.

Ana-Marie draws mandalas such as these for enjoyment and as reflexive practice rather than as an ‘art therapy’ per se (see Liebmann 2005, Gussak and Rosal 2016, Clark 2017). They also have another function: they serve as multi-coloured backgrounds and screen savers for her iPhone and young family’s other digital devices.

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FURTHER READING

Moving beyond the month-long ritual retreat in Switzerland, Letter from Mongolia 08: Honouring the Past considers the social fabric of memory and the ritual journeys through which associated Mongolian gelugpa cultural continuities are maintained.

The dedication required to sustain such ritual practice finds a social counterpart in Letter from Mongolia 04: Close to one’s chest, an ethnographic account of the relationships and quiet persistence that sustain Mongolian cultural life.

Through the intimate cultural practice of naming, Vignette 06: What’s in a Name? considers how individual identities are situated within the changing social world of post-socialist Mongolia.

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REFERENCES

Clark, Susan M. 2017. DBT-Informed Art Therapy: Mindfulness, Cognitive Behavior Therapy and the Creative Process. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Gussak, David E., and Marcia L. Rosal, eds. 2016. The Wiley Handbook of Art Therapy. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

Liebmann, Marian. 2005. Art Therapy for Groups: A Handbook of Themes and Exercises. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge.

End of transcript.

Refer to the INDEX for other articles that may be of interest.

© 2013-2026. CP in Mongolia. “Artscape 04: Mandalas in texta” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Open access should not be understood as the absence of attribution. Images and documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 22 August 2017. Last updated: 28 September 2026.