Field recordings, photographs and laser scans from hydropower dams in the Swiss Alps. The second part of our Swiss water trilogy, after "Melting Landscapes".
The 20th Century radically transformed the balance of the alpine landscape by building impressive hydraulic dams, that became the Modernist pride of Switzerland. They changed the country by providing energy to the cities located in the valleys below. Today, these dams bare witness to a foregone era, when glaciers and snow covered peaks were abundant and thought of as the eternal water providers of the nation. Yet all these glaciers are melting rapidly nowadays, and bountiful water will probably be sorely missed soon. Whether the monuments of modernity will take on a new significance in the course of renewable energy strategies is yet to be seen. Visiting the pumped-storage power plant Punt dal Gall and Ova Spin up in the Grisons over the past three years, the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot recorded and documented the dam infrastructures and their immediate surroundings with the help of ETH architecture students. Together they tested a mix of underwater, airborne, electromagnetic, and vibrational recordings as well as lidar technology and analogue photography to produce this compilation. Through a precise composition of images and sounds, the imposing stature of these dams, and all the technocratic power they symbolize, unfold in an overwhelming sensory discovery and experience of place. «Dammed Landscapes» sounds quite ominous — and it is, for it questions first and foremost, the scale and passing materiality of time and space embodied through these objects in the alpine landscape. - Christophe Girot