Armin Linke
»Alpi«
- Artists
- Armin Linke
- Title
- »Alpi«
- Year
- 2011
- Medium / Material / Technic
- Film, 16mm digitized, color, sound, 60 min.
-
»Alpi« is the result of a 7-year project on contemporary perceptions and visualizations of the Alpine landscape. With architectural researcher Piero Zanini and sound designer Renato Rinaldi, Armin Linke collected data on everyday Alpine life at forty locations in the mountainous region spanning eight countries. Contrary to an established iconography of the Alps as an imposing landscape, the film follows the cultural over-formations of nature. The sublime disappears in the gears of human activity when the observing camera leads in a tour d’horizon from Davos during the World Economic Forum to an Arab businessman surveying a staged Alpine Ski Dubai Dome or follows demonstrators during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy, and finally pans out to a seventy-five-year-old shepherd who lives with his flock at 2,000 meters in winter.
At the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when nature was beginning to be technically colonized, the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, to whom the mountain landscapes were familiar territory, created his Alpine triptych »La vita, La natura, La morte« (1896–99) in a modernist yet idyllic fashion. The panoramic installation in the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz and his proposal for a live cinema-like presentation at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris point to Linke’s episodic »Alpi« encounters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Both artists tackle the problem of translating the unfathomable nature of the greater landscape into human perspective.
