MOUNTAIN SCENARIOS #12

AL
Over the centuries, the dynamics of world conquest have had a purely horizontal character. If we look at the case of the mountains, however, we are faced with a “vertical colonialism”, to use Alexandra Laudo’s words, kept at bay by the fact that human biological characteristics do not lend themselves to the conditions imposed by high altitudes.
In the project I am Vertical you explore the concept of verticality and at the same time you force the possibility of inhabiting a condition at the limit of physical endurance.
In the performance act of I am vertical, whose title refers to a poem by Sylvia Plath, the representation of a human body brought to a condition of great stress is staged. The “dead zone” is a reference that today appears as a warning. Can you tell us what in particular you intend to focus on with this type of gesture?

GL
We wanted to focus on what is outside of the human comfort zone and related the horizontal plane as a safe and familiar position and the vertical as a way of transcending both one’s own body and the landscape one inhabits. The vertical strive is very active and we wanted to trace its history, the longing for the mountain tops and this quite recent desire that started in the 20th century with the attempts to climb Mount Everest. Also how one can relate to the body in a vertical way. To speculate about how we as an artist duo through our practice can explore our own capacities by putting ourselves in a vertical state. We’re interested in exploring these alternative states, which we refer to as a third position. To explore what happens in a high altitude situation and to recreate certain physical and psychological effects, but through an artistic method and to establish an alternative state for us to perform within. We practiced hanging upside down for long periods of time writing and reading text. How this forced upside down verticality translated into language. This is why we called the exhibition “I am vertical”, after a Sylvia Plath poem. How she related to the vertical and horizontal position of the human body through language.
It’s interesting as you mention how our biological conditions don’t lend themselves to these high altitude places. Maybe that’s the reason for the desire towards these places. The driving force, how the limits add to the drive, and it’s hard not to think about the death drive and the longing we carry to extinguish ourselves as a species. These high altitude places offer that possibility of destruction.

VL
Your work explores the different subjectivities of human beings related to the different experiences of time that can be experienced. In I am vertical, to which time do you refer and to which experience of subjectivity?
As in Plath’s poem, which you mention in the title of your work, there is a contrast between verticality/horizontality with a different meaning of value, where for Plath being vertical is a metaphor for a condition of discomfort, of geometric distance from life (I am vertical but I would rather be horizontal). Being horizontal, lying down, conceals a sort of humility or predisposition for existence, because one lives in the same dimension as nature, the stars and the flowers.

GL
We have also thought about the experience of time as that which holds the subject together. And we think of these high altitude places as a different time zone, a vertical time. Because of the low oxygen levels, you get a biological slowness to your thoughts, a much faster breathing rhythm, but at the same time an incredibly fast deterioration of the body. That’s why the territory above 8000 meters above sea level is called “the death zone”. It’s not a place of stable existence but of rapid transformation. So many different time rhythms collide in these places.
As you mention for Plath there’s something about verticality that she connects to being human, which she despises. How just being a vertical human in itself is an attack on the world, a separation from our surroundings and a position of superiority. Instead she longs for the horizontal as a sort of re-connection. How we must die to become living. We connected this to the vertical strive of the climber, almost like a mythical character. But is the climber longing for verticality or horizontality? Many corpses are left horizontal on different mountains around the world.
We were also interested in how Plath connects the vertical and horizontal in relation to writing. How writing and reading in many ways are horizontal practices and how a vertical language could be constructed. But also how the letter I manifest this erected position.

VL
The “death zone” to which you refer with the work “I am vertical” naturally refers to the concept of limit and extreme. The words of a great mountaineer such as Walter Bonatti come to mind: “Those of us who have experienced solitude and contact with death knew that we had the reins of our survival in our hands and responded to the laws of nature, we fed ourselves in order to live, we rediscovered our animality. When I returned, after months of life, to those dimensions, I found myself in a reality in which everyone seemed crazy. They were chasing things that had no value for me”.
How did you document your work and what references did you consider?

GL
That quote really says a lot about the experience of many explorers and climbers that have problems readjusting to society. But it also describes a certain view where it’s possible to step out of society, into something such as the mountain top. We ask ourselves if that step is really possible and try to think of it in a different way. That even though there are ecstatic experiences, the experience is still within the body and within existence. And maybe that’s the most interesting part, that we are carrying these possibilities within ourselves as crevasses calling out for us. The spine as a mountain range. We never see it as we are documenting something, but more as a recording process. And writing was very important in that work, to write all the time while positioning the body in different ways.
Recluse The History of the mountain was an important book, with his biography and the connection of the mountain to the political. Michel Serres texts about climbing and the body. How physical movements instruct our thinking in general. The poetry of Sylvia Plath.