up, up, down, down 

Installation 

“Learning from the earth”, 2 week residency, Alps Art Academy.

ART SAFIENTAL Biennale 2022, Tenna, Switzerland

Short film and Installation. Digitally printed tarpaulin, rope, rocks, sticks, plant specimen. 

In the Safiental valley, directions are given not as left or right, east or west, but by up or down, at what altitude and, how many valleys over?

Tarparium imagines the solid mass of the mountain as a fluid plane – a soft rock.  A satellite image of Tenna on a tarpaulin – a projection of the land, between analogue and digital. The tarp is deployed in the landscape, to offer shelter, to protect from wet ground, to map, to collect samples, and to harness the wind, generating alternative, imagined topographies.




A short film documents one of many exploratory hikes around Tenna, starting from the Berghotel Alpenblick in the village (1640m) to the Tenner Alp (1940m). Documenting how plants change with altitude and reading the shape of the mountains. An attempt to commit a landscape to memory so that it can be used as a means of navigation and orientation.









Using hiking as a methodology to learn the terrain; from valley to village, from village to forest, from forest to pasture and from pasture to peak. Each time the tarp is pitched using found objects collected en route, to create an inhabitable facsimile of its surrounding topography.