A receptive, fevered individual passes in front of a towering peak or a Rothko painting: the eyes convey the resonance within, this vibrant individual enters into the depths of the immanent reality of the Spirit, a door has opened wide.
Another, facing the same mountain or canvas, passes by, looking down: for this figure, the painting is like a gutter in the Kalahari, he is in a hurry, he is rushing to lunch, insensitive to aesthetics.
The mountains are not a beach. People go to the mountains as they would to the beach.
Dolomiti Contemporanee (DC) opposes this neglectful approach.
In the UNESCO Dolomites, Dolomiti Contemporanee finds abandoned or underused sites that are hidden or lost resources. These include ex-factories, villages, or small hilltop hamlets that want to re-emerge from inertia, after having been prematurely buried or frozen in time. We temporarily transform these sites of Alpine architecture, for months or years, into artistic and cultural centres or base camps for complex environmental research.
Such dormant spaces are nonetheless valuable and can fulfil a variety of potential uses, which we want to project from the past into a meaningful future; to create alpine spaces that are not trivially spread out for tourist use, but rather mountains that think. Every year we host hundreds of anti-mimetic artists, architects, designers, ecologists, scientists, astrophysicists and mountaineers in residence at these sites, with artists having the priority. They are innovative, they break definitions, they discuss everything, they create space, they generate new landscapes, they are practical people, people who practise the Spirit.
