You Look Into Everything

Installation
Mountaineer (Dummy), Wreckpiece (Readymade), Postcard (14,5 x 9,5 cm)
Solo Exhibition at Privatraum, Berlin, 2024


The Ascent

In the early modern era, mountains were considered wild nature, desolate wilderness, the home of demons and gods that could not or would not be disturbed unpunished. It was only at the end of the 18th century that artists and scientists began to show an interest in the mysteries of the mountains. The “enlightened” people, driven by reason, wanted to understand and conquer nature, which, in Rousseau’s sense, was both the guideline and the destination of their desires. The start and first highlight of alpine mountaineering was the “conquest” of Mont Blanc in 1786 by the doctor Piccard and the crystal seeker Balmat. Countless ascents followed and an exploratory desire turned into a competition between humans and nature.

„Der Kampf, den der Mensch in unblutiger Weise gegen die übermächtigen Gewalten der Natur besteht, ist der ehrenvollste (…) .“

(” The battle that man wages in a bloodless manner against the overpowering forces of nature is the most honorable (…) .” )

A frequently used metaphor was also that of the “duel”, which associates a fight between equal opponents with fair means. At the same time, with the beginning of industrialization at the end of the 18th century, humans made use of the machine and completely raised themselves above natural systems, initiating the end of the geological age of the Holocene. It is now humans, alienated and isolated from nature, who are invading the death zone of the world’s highest mountains. Hundreds of mountaineers stand in line on the way to the summit of the 8000-meter peaks and compete with the forces of nature. By crossing the mortal space with the help of paid Sherpas and additional oxygen from bottles, death is challenged and “immortality” is achieved.

The Flight

At 07:02 on January 24, 1966, Air India Flight 101 was preparing to land in Geneva in the direction of Mont Blanc. Due to the failure of a positioning instrument, there was a mistake in the exchange of information between the pilot and air traffic controllers at an altitude of 5,800 meters – so the pilot was instructed by the controllers to maintain altitude. If visibility allowed, he could descend and fly over the Mont Blanc summit at about 300 m. The captain confirmed receipt of the instruction and replied that the aircraft was about to fly over Mont Blanc. However, the air traffic controller recognized that the aircraft had not yet reached the mountain and replied: “You have 5 miles to the Mont Blanc”, to which the captain replied with “Roger”. At 07:07, the Air India aircraft left its flight altitude, began to descend and crashed into the summit of Mont Blanc at 500 km/h. The plane was named after one of the highest mountains in the world, the 8586 m high Kangchenzönga in the Himalayas (Nepal/India).

The Fall

Like the character of Icarus from ancient mythology, more and more extreme mountaineers
are ignoring the warning against transgression and presumption and ascending too far into the sky, above the clouds. The wax holding Ikarus wings together begins to melt, causing the structure to break apart. Icarus’ flight ends tragically, despite all the warnings from his father Daedalus not to fly too close to the sun. Kemper found the wreckage of the Air India in 2019 at the bottom of the Bosson Glacier as part of a series of expeditions by artist Julian Charriere accompanied by Johannes Förster.

Wind and the shifting of the melting glacier ice caused the piece of the airplane to drift to the lower part of the glacier. There it remained, like a piece of the wing with which Icarus miscalculated his altitude. It is no longer the wax that dissolves in the sun, nor the airplane that explodes on the mountain, it is the ice that melts, breaks and reveals the horrors of the past. The polished surface of the aluminum now reflects the dawning apocalypse into the present, relentlessly like Nemesis.

The horror of the crash on Mont Blanc is now replaced by other tragedies and the narrative ofthe Mediterranean Sea as the crash site of a contemporary Icarus no longer adequately describes the scenario nor should it be about mountaineering. In ancient times, the sea was seen as a threatening area full of horrors (storms, shoals, monsters). Today, the Mediterranean is replaced by the roaring waters of the Bossons Glacier at the Mont Blanc, which make their way down into the valley, not far from where the piece of wreckage was found. The locations of the waters are real then as now, the metaphor of hybris projected onto them has only left the shelter of myth and entered reality in the case of the melting glacier. The presence of hybris as a site is the same in both cases, or at least can be localized close to each other. There is the space of nature, which punishes Icarus as well as our ignorance and arrogance and puts an end to our flight.

If we leave the spatial perspective and look at the temporal one, there is a dramatic difference. The story of hybris in Greek mythology or that of the threatening apocalypse in the Bible are events that happen in an undefined future – they have not yet taken place. This allows us to believe that we still have time, because the event is not happening right now. Switzerland’s glaciers have lost 10 % of their total volume in the last two years – as much as was measured in the 30 years between 1960 and 1990. We have transferred hybris from the realm of mythology to the temporal, to the moment of the beginning of industrialization. Within the projection of the myth, we have seen the father figure in Daedalus and lost sight of our mother nature. In the steady flight towards the sun, the ice around us begins to melt, oceans start to boil and floods pour over arid land.

The death zones of the Himalayas, which many adventurers measure themselves against, become climatic death zones worldwide. People now find themselves unwillingly in these zones, people who could never afford a trip to the world’s 8000-meter peaks.