(Un)Mapping (In)Stability
Alternate mapping of the Rhone Glacier at Furka Pass
in:dépendance Residency, ETH Zurich, Summer 2024
The tools, techniques, and resulting representations of maps have evolved out of the supposed need to mark territorial divides, delineate private property, surveil, militarize, and colonize. Typical maps presume land and its inhabitants to be static and unchanging.
The Rhône Glacier in particular proves otherwise—in just the last two years the glacier has shrunk by ten percent. This temporality is evident not in maps or satellite imagery but at a human, everyday scale, through masses of tarps lining the glacier in desperate attempts to slow the melt—although strictly for the purpose of preserving the private profits of tourism.
The following installations (mis)use the common aesthetics of surveying and Hotel Furkablick itself, seen in the red stripes of the Daniel Buren shutters, standard surveying tools, and environmental registration devices such as wind socks. Patterns abstracted from traditional land surveying techniques are painted onto six posts, which are then scattered throughout the landscape as a provocation of the ways in which an impossibility of control and stability might be instrumentalized.
What opportunities may surface from relinquishing control and redefining accuracy? How might ever-increasing instability due to climate change prove productive in disrupting the ability to delineate property and territory?
A second installation repurposes two of the posts for a green-screen assembly. The following images are stills from a film that casts videos and images onto the flowing fabric, taken the previous summer in 2023 while traveling along the Rhône from mouth to source for an ongoing project, Territorial Tendencies.
The film conflates the entirety of the river, juxtaposing the glacial source with moments of extraction, tourism, resilience, and adaptation captured along the river's course.
During my residency, I was struck constantly by the feeling of being part of a collective, made not only of overlapping in:dépendance residents sharing thoughts, work, and ideas, but of a lineage of Furkart residents who have each drawn inspiration from this special place.
Pieces of sublime abound in Furka, from fog-covered blurry mountains to fuzzy alpine weeds. Of the English, German, Swiss-German, Russian, and Italian words I heard during my stay, none are big enough to describe how magic this place is.
