The mountains resemble the very best part of me, so much so that they have become my “safe place.” A safe place is an imaginative technique to relieve symptoms of anxiety and distress in people who have experienced trauma. When I need it, I close my eyes and imagine myself on the top of a mountain whose summit I have laboriously conquered. It is a real summit, one which I visited with my partner a few years ago in Yosemite Park, California. Around me on the horizon, there is nothing but woods and sky. When I am perfectly focused, I get a tingling sensation and I have a feeling as if roots were coming out of my body and sinking into the stone below me. The mountain is in me; I am the mountain.
The mountains were a belated discovery for me. When I was growing up, family vacations meant going to the beach, or traveling to some European country. Mountainside scenery was not on my horizon, neither in winter nor summer, and I always took it for granted that it was because I somehow preferred it. Over the past ten years, I have undergone various transformations: with the maturity of my thirties, I learned to listen to my desires, and to understand that they often did not take the obvious path, the one I perhaps took for granted. I changed job, I changed partner, and among many important changes, I understood that I prefer leafy woods to sunny beaches, uphill walks to swimming amid the waves. Mountains have the same effect on me as they do on my one-year-old daughter, who can’t help but squeal with delight as soon as we hoist her into a backpack for a hike. I have never put on a pair of skis or straddled a snowboard, but I love hiking for miles, backpacking, and watching the gradual change of scenery, step by step, minute by minute. I love encounters with plants and flowers I’ve never come across, those with tame yet ever lesser known animals in person, with wild animals observed from afar with respect, and with fatigued yet smiling fellow hikers with whom to exchange greetings. I love passing through villages that are almost uninhabited, or only recently repopulated, and through forests that were pastures up until only a few years ago.
This is Thinking Like a Mountain: a slow vision, dilated over the time of the two-year closure of GAMeC in Bergamo. A light step, made up of small but meaningful interventions for those who experience the territory day in day out. The realization that there is nothing “natural” about what surrounds us, since almost every corner of our landscape has been manmade, but nonetheless we must approach it with kindness and care when we introduce a new element such as art. This provides scope for a chance encounter with contemporary art, outside the museum, right where you least expect it.
Marta Papini
