Behind the Mountain Range, Somewhere is a site-responsive intervention developed in different landscapes in France, Austria, and Italy. The project emerged from a shared reflection on the ecological transformations of the present and on the need for new ways of understanding nature beyond the opposition between society and environment.
The work consists of fragments of texts by contemporary philosophers, scientists, artists, and historians placed directly within the landscape. The selected quotations propose alternative ways of thinking about nature, emphasizing interdependence, co-becoming, and the complex networks of relations linking humans and non-humans.
Two versions of the project have been realized. In the first, the texts are written directly on stones found on site. In the second, developed in a forest where stones were absent, the sentences are encoded through a simple color-based alphabet and distributed across wooden sticks together with a key for deciphering them. In both cases, reading becomes inseparable from walking, searching, and paying attention to the surrounding environment.
Rather than presenting nature as a distant place existing “behind the mountain range, somewhere,” the work approaches landscape as a field of relations in which biological, historical, social, and political processes are deeply entangled.
Sites and Texts
“It is extremely frustrating. Many people still believe that society and nature are two different things.” J. Moore, Capitalism in the web of life 2018. Vinci, 2021
“Les grandes accellerations a partir de la seconde guerre mondiale ont laisse des traces sur les roches dans les eaux, le ciel et sur toutes les creatures.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Francia St pierre des Champs, 2021
“All life is actively, creatively, incessantly engaged in environmental-making.” J. Moore, The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 2014 Lermoos, Austria, 2021
“Actually, ecology is: paying attention to the webs of relationships that you are enmeshed in.” D. Donald, On What Terms Can We Speak? Lecture at the University of Lethbridge, 2010
Montespertoli (FI), 2022, Per Un sentiero di segni, curated Alessandra Scappini
“Nature is not simply the landscape we see from behind a picture window, in a moment disconnected from those that preceded and will follow it; nor is it vista from a lofty mountain peak.”
M. Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, 1996. Montespertoli (FI), 2022, Per Un sentiero di segni, curated Alessandra Scappini
