Saturday 25 October 2008

Mountains are for Masochists


(Page of booklet that accompanies Alexandra Ferreira's exhibition)

Extract of my text:
No point of return. Every passage looks different when going backwards: the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end

that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale: a dimension that was not obvious, step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans. just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling. To be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still a valley a landscape. Where is the invisible border between down here and up there, between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created by animals, humans and cottages?

One summer I saw a shepherd (he told me that during winter he worked at a ski resort or as butcher in his home town in South Tyrol) jumping alongside the line of sheep that forms a white chain against the carved lines on the mountainside. He was running next to the sheep, jumping, leaving the tricky ground aside while using his stick as reliable leg. He also told me about the water places on top of the plateau, a spot the cows would find in their rhythm and way. No manipulation. Becoming-cow in learning about speed and slowness and herd: the whole system of paths and smells and triggers and hints to climb, settle, rest, move, find, drink, eat, digest and keep up a sane system of energy that would sustain also the unborn calf travelling with you.

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