Free entry.
No prior registration required.

As part of the exhibition Potosí Principle - Archive, Kunstraum Schwaz is showing the film Peak by Hannes Lang (film director, cameraman and film producer). Afterwards there'll be a discussion with Nadja Ayoub (director of Kunstraum Schwaz) and Hannes Lang.

Peak (2011, 89 min.)

The mountains are calling! Each year hundreds of thousands tourists come to the white winter paradise of the mountains. A portrait of the Alps in a changing environment.

The search for paradise on earth is as old as mankind. In order to get a glimpse of this paradise, we travel the continents, search in the most remote corners oft of the world, dive under water and climb the highest mountains. This is how an entire industry has developed in order to allow us to reach our utopia of untouched nature in the easiest fashion. 

Even in the raw field of the Alps, mass tourism has spread and has left its mark on the landscape. However, paradise is in trouble. Due to climate change and its effects on the lack of snow, it has become necessary to deploy massive technology to produce the perfect landscape independently from nature. Excavators rip up the earth, a computer operated switch room lies deep in the mountain, towers are erected, pipes and cables are laid in the ground, snow machines continuesly spray artificial snow onto slopes.

The Alp landscape has become a bizarre hybrid of technology and nature. The ski regions have to constantly upgrade the technology. If they don’t, the constant stream of tourists will abruptly come to a halt. The stronger this habitat changes, the more its beauty becomes domesticated, the faster it will disappear before our eyes.

Over the period of a year, PEAK observes this production process in the Alps and uncovers what is usually hidden from the winter tourists beneath a thick blanket of artificial snow. The film shows the landscapes’ modifications and the inextinguishable traces that these invasions leave behind. PEAK questions the relationship between nature and technology. How artificial is a landscape allowed to be? Or – to put in other terms - How artificial must it look in order to fulfill and justify our archaic desire for paradise on earth?

Press release and Movie Poster © unafilm