Alpi

»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.

Camera: Armin Linke; Sound: Renato Rinaldi; Editing: Giuseppe lelasi; Editing consultant: Jan Ralske, Kal Karman; Sound editing: Giuseppe lelasi, Renato Rinaldi; Sound Postproduction: Frank Halbig, Christian Heck, Giuseppe lelasi, David Loscher; Title sequence, poster, packaging: Cornel Windlin, Gregor Huber.

With the support of: Assessorato alla Cultura della Valle d’Aosta Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; German Films; Kunst Meran/o Arte; Medien und Architektur Biennale Graz Minerva Stiftung, Montura; Museion, Bolzano; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen; Neue Galerie am Joanneum, Graz; Provincia autonoma di Trento; Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer; Trentino Film Commission; University for Arts & Design Karlsruhe (HfG).