First Bulletin of the Extinct Glaciers

Forecasts, Obituaries and Listening for the Marmolada Glacial Landscape

 

Matteo Vianello

Landscape scholarships – edition 2022/2023

subject area: Theories and policies for landscape

tutors: Simonetta Zanon, head of Landscape projects area; Luigi Latini, chairman of the Scientific Committee of Fondazione Benetton

This research focuses on the aesthetics and practices affecting the glaciers of the Dolomites, particularly the Marmolada glacial group.

In light of the scientific projections that predict their final melting within the next few decades, the extinction of glaciers triggers a crisis in the tools with which the landscape of inhabitation is conceived, not only posing the risky challenge of culturally defining the death or birth of an ecology, but above all subverting its temporalities. For this, the research collects the practices of transformation and representation that have defined the ice landscape, inferring relationships of temporalities between the climatic, political, and cultural dimensions of the glacier.

Exactly as the Mountaineer’s Bulletins have historically succeeded in collecting interdisciplinary images of alpine glacial landscapes, this research chooses to repurpose this media to return an imaginary Bulletin, including different types of sources: a series of interviews with glaciologists, journalists, designers, and artists; consultation of historical archives related to the Marmolada; and selection of an interdisciplinary bibliography.

In discussing the representation of glaciers as a dying ecology, the research outcome is a survey of possible interpretive tools for the ice landscape, for a new perception and narrative of it.

Matteo Vianello, 1992, Architect and a researcher holds a PhD in Architecture.

After a series of travel and educational experiences in Berlin, Lisbon and Hong Kong, he devoted himself to research activity side by side with teaching collaboration. He approaches the study of landscape theories by writing and editing publications and workshops while experiencing the border landscapes between Italy and Slovenia. He curated and designed (together with Studio Wild) The Forbidden Garden installation in 2020, collaborating with the Botanical Garden of Padua. Since 2018, his research activity has focused on the study of landscape occupation and representation. He curated the event/exhibition series Matters Of Lives: Encounters on the edge of the Pluriverse, a reflection on the aesthetics of the non-human and the relationships it weaves with the human, through a selection of works by 11 international female artists. In parallel, he edited a publication related to the event, on display at the Museum of Italian Design on the occasion of the Salone del Mobile 2023 in Milan.