The “Il Bosco degli Abietti” project, has origins from a reflection on humanity and its habitat. The predestinated territory, where this narrative takes place, is the Belluno Dolomites (UNESCO World Heritage site). In the collective imagination, the mountain, is an happy place of peace of senses, new-born enthusiasm, dialogue with the absolute and with oneself. In art this had been well analysed, but we might say that the representation of mountain has stopped at the Romantic-Divisionalist period. Therefore, it is tempting to probe an alternative path, one that leads into the depths of the dark forest and allows a different kind of vision about mountain than the classical one. A vision that speaks about narrowness of thought, violence and loneliness undoubtedly caused by the closure of the valleys by these rocky massif that are the Dolomites. The research arise from a play on words: abito, abitare, abete, abietto, rovesciamento. Abito as dress, skin, but also as Abitare (living) in a certain place, that with a little modification becomes Abete (fir), woods, a fantastic and dark place. Abietto (abject) is one who severely deviates from a preconstituted morality, that leads to an alteration of upright phallic visuality, which therefore promotes a regression to wildness, to animal. But this does not lead to a distraction of the subject as such; through a subjective crisis, a metamorphosis, new possibilities are generated and these new possibilities enable the realization of this narrative. To overturn one’s own skin, one’s own dress therefore, to quote a great artist, to get closer to an idea of salvific wildness, to Zarathustriana loneliness, to consciousness, to the salvific mountaineer, the one who holds consciousness, freedom, whose mission is to make it discoverable to the people of the valleys.
In this installation, a window of clear Tyrolean taste is presented. Developed as if it was a tombstone, it becomes a trial of mountain people, a burial place, a memorial plaque. Opening this window there is no an handsome alpine panorama, but rather a wall created through the use of sedimentary material: eroded pure Dolomia. Neither inside nor outside the probable lodge can be seen; this process is summed up by the concept of the mountaineer walled up alive by four stones. So, the mountain is not that idyllic world pre-packaged by the advertisement of ski slopes or beautiful outings, but rather a place of restricted possibilities, closure, a suffocating place. Thus a rupture is created between the precious material, which becomes mud, used for the realization of this view that does not exist and the stereotype.
