• DATE: 2018

• MATERIALS: copper, hollow-form repoussé

• SCALE: outdoor sculpture

• DIMENSIONS: 36”x36”x18”

• SITE: Tenna, Graubünden, Switzerland

• STATUS: complete

• Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus, by Virginia Burrus, University of Chicago Press; First Edition (February 19, 2023), 211pp., ISBN-13: 978-0226824567 (see pages 103-105, 108, 112-113).

• Arts Safiental, 2018 Land Art Biennale, Alps Art Academy, Switzerland.

• La Val Stussavgia ha carmalà il's artists by Donatella Bonifazi (television interview broadcast on Sil Punct, RTR, Switzerland) (7.9.2018) (clip, time code: 01:08 onward).

Bronze Age technology spread across what is now Western Europe with the help of chalcopyrite, a copper-bearing mineral whose deposits still lie beneath much of the Grisons and the broader Swiss Plateau. As glacial forces carved this landscape in deep time and present time, early human cultures likewise cut into the terrain to unearth what lay beneath. These overlapping systems (geologic and economic) have both shaped the Alpine region, leaving behind legible traces in stone and story alike, 

Chalcopyrite, long mistaken for gold, becomes an ideal material anchor for myth-making. It ushered in metallurgy with the Urnfield Culture around 1200 BCE and continues to power contemporary life via copper’s presence in the global electrical grid. In Switzerland, where the Alps are often treated as symbols of purity and permanence, chalcopyrite’s ongoing utility bridges sacred landscape and industrial materiality, inviting a contemporary myth of convergence, not opposition. 

I produced a copper repoussé boulder that I released into the high Alps. A sculptural object placed and documented at multiple sites, evoking both displacement and the search for buried material promising wealth. Like rumors of a lost treasure, this boulder is meant to draw seekers upward across vertical terrain, echoing cultural conceptual metaphors like UP IS GOOD (which forms the basis for value-derived expressions like “stocks are rising” and “he is an upstanding citizen”). The object’s absence will become its presence: dismantled and scattered after installation, only photos, whispered locations, and a catalog of sightings remain. In a time of scaled-up extraction and distributed networks, this work returns us to the mountain where memory, myth and material converge.