Within the recently inaugurated exhibition Fossi io teco; e perderci nel verde, perhaps better than others, Valentina Viviani’s work—El deseo de transformarse en montaña para abrazar el cielo (“The desire to turn into a mountain to embrace the sky”, 2025)—embodies the notion of the mountain as an archetype of natural cyclicity and as a symbol of generational continuity, characteristic of the entire Biennial of the Orobie Mountains. The further we continue with the implementation of the program, the more I feel I can say that what binds together the works of the artists and communities involved is precisely the reflection on life cycles, approached here from various perspectives, both human and “more-than-human” (to quote Anna Tsing again).^[1]

On this path, the mature thought of anthropologist Tim Ingold—as summarized in the volume The Rise and Fall of Generation Now—makes a major visionary contribution. In his essay, Ingold opposes the common thinking of generations as overlapping layers, like sheets stacked on top of each other, so characteristic of the digital age, proposing the image of interwoven threads as an alternative. A promotor since the 1980s of a notion of humans as an element that forms part of a natural continuum to which all the entities of the living world contribute, Ingold is today among the most staunch detractors of the “big sciences,”guilty, in his view, of seeking an escape route from the Earth rather than trying to make it a better place to live in.

“The whole digital world,” he said in an interview a few months ago with Corriere della Sera, ”is not even remotely sustainable in terms of energy consumption, raw materials and pollution effects, and will not last beyond the present century.”^[2] Ingold’s view on the development of technosciences has become so radicalized that it has led him to imagine a future “beyond the digital”—an act that challenges the epistemic limits of our capacity for thought—and to condemn the post-humanist vision, guilty, in his view, of having compromised our species’ ability to come up with an active, positive role for itself in the ecological regeneration of the planet. What Ingold calls for is the recovery of an anthropocentric worldview, one which is nonetheless “non-dominant” in nature, capable of restoring confidence in the future and courage for personal and collective actions.

Ingold invites us to rethink our idea of generations from an alternative concept of time, one unlike the linear, fragmented and accelerated notion typical of the digital paradigm. The threads image, which privileges interconnectedness and continuity, rethinks the relationship between past, present and future not as separate segments but as interweaving processes of learning, adaptation and transformation. In this perspective, tradition, i.e. the preserved knowledge of the communities in our mountains, does not appear as a relic of the past, but as a regenerative principle that is manifested in the present. This idea contrasts with the approach of digital culture and concepts such as that of the “ecological transition,” which look upon the past as an obstacle to be overcome through innovation, and thus forever viewed in terms of discontinuity.

Ingold’s approach resonates in many of the practices of Thinking Like a Mountain, a project that stems from the belief that the future is not something necessarily to be planned, but a generative dimension, arising from dialogue and collaboration between different generations.

Lorenzo Giusti

^[1] Fossi io teco; e perderci nel verde, curated by Greta Martina, is the winning project of the twelfth edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize. Valentina Viviani’s El deseo de transformarse en montaña para abrazar el cielo is a blue handkerchief that belonged to the artist’s great-grandfather, on which is embroidered the phrase that gives the work its title. The words are inspired by the story of King Atlas, legendary monarch of Mauritania, who is said to have invented the heavenly globe and who, according to legend, wished to change into a mountain in order to embrace the sky.

^[2] See Federica Lavarini’s interview with Tim Ingold in the section “La Lettura,” August 25, 2024, p. 25.