Alpine Landschaften (Alpine Landscapes)
Since childhood the Alpine landscape has been a part of my life. The landscape I knew back then was unoccupied and barely developed; that has changed radically through the growth of tourism. A new way of dealing with Alpine spaces has begun. I see this sort of occupying the landscape and the restructuring that has resulted from it as a possible work approach. I found I could use my direct experience, having witnessed how the leisure and tourism industry have continuously come up with new possibilities and sport trends, while at the same time manifesting a growing disconnectedness from the landscape context. The activities taking place in a landscape that is fragile due to its topographical conditions are only necessarily tied to a place by the type of sports practiced there, otherwise the landscapes would be interchangeable and not site-specific.
Exploring viewpoints and standpoints based on the process of motion is in keeping with my serial way of working because in their perception the photographs are constantly changing their emphasis, shifting, repeating. Basically, every photograph is a fragment of a more complex arrangement. Through their ambiguousness, the photos go beyond the typical uniformity of place and time – as snapshots – and in a literal sense expand the “horizon” of perception. The “serial” format derives on the one hand from a rejection of the “iconographic image” and on the other hand from the fact that “what we see on the retina is never a single image but multiple points of view”. This experience transforms our peripheral vision into foveal vision. By putting the only stable viewpoint into perspective, we are no longer capable of reconstructing an image or a narration. Instead, we are dealing with a putting into motion of things and ourselves, but without gaining control over the visible.
