TRACES IN MONTESPLUGA
INSIGHT
An experimental multimedia project, this interdisciplinary research focuses on Montespluga, a village located at 1908 m above sea level on the Splügen Pass, the borderline between the Western and Eastern Alps and between Italy and Switzerland. This work aims to question the established dualism between humanity and nature that dominates the western vision, focusing her attention on the flora and the connections between the elements of the landscape. Flora, biodiversity, the mechanisms of life and the relationship with atmospheric elements are the main topics of interest in this exploration. Embracing their complexity, Susanna Pozzoli observes, photographs, collects and then freely reworks the materials with a sensitive perspective that opposes anthropocentrism.  

In the summer of 2022, after an absence of two years caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Susanna rediscovers Montespluga. The village consists of a few houses and a few barns divided into small hamlets, set in an open landscape, characterised by a large artificial lake for hydroelectric production. The extremely dry summer of 2022 highlights the environmental change underway and the profound change in the relationship between man and land that has taken place over the last 30 years. The emotional reactions of holidaymakers to the melting of the perennial glaciers, the visible decrease in water and the disappearance of many features of the picturesque landscape of the Alps are the stimulus to undertake a research project that the author has been developing ever since, with the scientific support of Saul Caligari, an expert in botany and the territory, and Barbara Bonnefoy, a lecturer in environmental psychology at the
University of Nanterre, Paris.

The results translate into the creative gesture some of the reflections that emerged in the numerous interviews carried out and in the periods of study and confrontation. A series of workshops and actions shared with residents and holiday-makers concretise the desire to attract the public’s attention, in the hope of activating a critical reflection on the way we pose and act towards flora and our environment, as individuals and as a community. Photographs, sound montages, collages, videos and herbaria guide the viewer through this richness. It is a story in fragments that invites a new experience of the mountains, far from the stereotypes of the picturesque and the sublime.