Tides in a mountain valley (2005 - 2009)

The series portrays the Contra Dam Lake in southern Switzerland. On the conceptual level, the project focuses on the original natural dynamism of tidal movements - as a paradoxical phenomenon arising from human interference with nature, which sadly on one occasion in the past had catastrophic consequences. The structural survey of the mountain slopes flanking the reservoir had been botched, and the end result of massive variation in the water level during the test phase of the facility was disaster. In the night of 9 October 1963, 250 million cubic metres of rock plunged into the artificial lake of Vajont in northern Italy, creating a tidal wave several hundred metres higher than what was at that time the highest barrage in the world, and levelled five villages to the ground. The photographs hover between a precisely documented representation of the landscape and a feeling-charged approach based on the reflective memory of the observing eye. This is what gives the pictures their characteristic impetus: the viewer is challenged to decode their content - both in geophysical and analytic terms, and aesthetically. The characteristic element of central perspective permits a reading that is positively contemplative - one that lends subversive voice to the contradiction that this open series of pictures inwardly contains. Variable size Lambda prints, edition of 30. © Prolitteris Zurich