A Mountain Comes Down

This project explores forms of sensory attention - toward rock, ice, water, animals, and movement - that are accruing around a mountain in a remote Swiss valley after large parts of it came crashing down unexpectedly on August 23, 2017.

That day, almost 4 million cubic meters of rock broke off the north-eastern flank of the towering Piz Cengalo. First explanatory attempts hypothesized that climate change had warmed up the permafrost to such a degree that it had rendered parts of the Cengalo unstable. “The mountain has a fever,” one a villager spray-painted on the walls of his damaged house. Others argued that climate change played only one part in what is always already a volatile environment.

Focusing ethnographically on novel and re-surfacing sensory modalities both technical (like super-sensitive radar systems) and non-technical (like the human discernment of dust), I ask: How are humans and non-humans -ice, water, rock, people - newly orienting themselves towards each other as the habitability of Europe’s Alpine regions is becoming more fraught? What attunements are being (re)generated with rapid environmental change?

I ask not only what it means to live under the weight of anthropogenic change and the vulnerability that comes with geological hazards, but also how differently positioned actors are coming to relate to the volatile monumentality of the mountain.