MICHAEL JAKOB
In order to start our conversation, one idea which came immediately to mind was that of you “entering” symbolically the mountain, going inside. Normally, people don’t enter mountains, but remain outside of them.

By penetrating into the mountain, you actually do something which is linked to the history of mountains, since before people started to look at mountains they actually used them. Long before they started to contemplate mountains, to paint them and to show an interest in them, they used and modified them, for instance by excavating all kind of material from inside.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
I think there are many different dimensions to what it means to make a hole in a mountain. I’m not yet sure which of these is the most compelling, because there are so many layers to the act of entering a mountain — what it does to you, and how it differs so profoundly from the way we are used to looking at mountains.

It’s interesting to remember that, historically, people didn’t climb mountains. The idea of reaching a peak is a relatively recent one. In the Himalayas, for example, local communities didn’t ascend Mount Everest or other summits. The practice of climbing them — now often carried out by Sherpas — was originally a European invention, tied to a specific desire to conquer and to look from above. It’s essentially the perspective of looking at the mountain versus climbing it.

Making a hole in the mountain, however, is something else entirely. Extracting what lies within — or even removing the mountain altogether, as happens in some large-scale mining operations, like copper mines — takes this relationship to another level. In some cases, entire peaks are dismantled, transformed into voids, and the displaced material forms new artificial mountains elsewhere.

These actions reveal different dimensions of the human relationship with what we call a mountain — a relationship that has changed dramatically, especially since industrialization. Yet even before that, in pre-industrial times, humans were already entering the earth: going into caves, tunnelling, mining. So this impulse to go inside a mountain rather than simply look at it, has deep historical roots.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Absolutely. If I understand well, in your work there is always the sense that mountains are an idea, that they are cultural constructions. Mountains are not just geographical and geological realities; they actually have been ‘built’ by different generations layer after layer.

As you rightly say, something happened in Europe probably three to four hundred years ago, and then we started to look to mountains.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Yes, they became something else entirely. Mountains are profoundly visual.

The parts of the mountain that we can’t reach — which are often the majority — are essentially useless to us in practical terms. We don’t inhabit them, we don’t use them; they exist mostly as images, as a visual background. When you are blind, that background disappears, and with it, the mountain’s significance. So, mountains are visual in a way that few other things are.

The ocean, for example, is also visual, but it’s something we interact with — we travel across it, we use it. Mountains, by contrast, are often just visual presences, images that matter to us only through sight.

MICHAEL JAKOB
The visuality of mountains can take different forms. It makes me think about Chateaubriand, the French writer of the early nineteenth century, who, around 1800, wanted to go and ‘see’ the mountains, because at that time it had become a real fashion. Everyone set off on picturesque and sublime tours in order to admire Alpine landscapes.

Chateaubriand made his trip to Chamonix but once arrived there, he found that the sight of mountains was rather boring and deceptive. Often when you stand in front of them, you hardly see anything interesting. In order to make sense, a very special point of view is necessary. If you are at the right distance (and this distance is culturally determined), you can indeed see the mountains. Instead, if you are too close to them you hardly can grasp anything. You get the sense of some details, but you don‘t see the mountains. The mere fact of seeing the mountains, besides it being a historical construction, depends on perspective, point of view, and many other factors.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
It’s a visual problem — not a real one. If we’re talking about images versus non-visual things, that distinction is key.

I don’t really know when the idea emerged that visuality, or images, became more important — perhaps it began when we first gained the ability to mass-produce them. And that’s actually what my work in the mine also touches upon: what changed in the world, and in our relationship to the world, once images could be reproduced on a massive scale.

Of course, we’ve always been able to create images — think of cave paintings — but those didn’t have a major impact on humanity as a whole. The real transformation happened when images became reproducible, when they started to circulate widely and shape our collective perception.

MICHAEL JAKOB
So yours is a Benjaminian idea, is that right?

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Kind of — though it’s not so much about the artwork itself, but rather about the image as such. I’m interested in how our worldview changed with the invention of the printing press, with etching — and, in this case, also with painting.

When people went to church, for example, they might see a painting of a landscape within a religious context, perhaps depicting a place they had never seen or even heard of. That’s what fascinates me: the idea that humans could form a visual imagination of a landscape they hadn’t directly experienced. I think that was the beginning of a globalized sense of vision — something that developed in Europe and profoundly shaped how we see the world.

This shift also has a major colonial dimension. It was through etchings and printed landscape images that Europeans formed their visual understanding of the so-called colonial world. We perceived other territories — those we were exploiting through colonial power — only through these printed, black-and-white images.

That’s partly why I chose the setting of the caves and the mining landscape. The work belongs to a series I call Landscape Paintings — though, in this particular case, “painting” isn’t the most accurate term. It would be more precise to call it landscape etching, landscape drawing, or landscape print.

MICHAEL JAKOB
I like this idea of yours. Working in the field of landscape theory the following idea occurred to me: we know that, in general, before the seventeenth century, even travellers didn’t really care to look at mountains. There was no aesthetic sense in doing so.

Mountains were considered to be ugly, a sort of divine punishment. All of this started to change only around 1680, with Thomas Burnett, the author of the Sacred History of the Earth, and John Dennis, the author of the Letter from Turin, and other protagonists. Influenced by these pioneers, people started to identify mountains as an aesthetic phenomenon.

This major change which still affects us was linked to the aesthetic of the sublime. All of this happened in the same years when Claude Lorrain, certainly the most influential landscape painter of all time, provided patterns for sublime and picturesque landscapes and influenced in this way the invention of the picturesque garden. Lorrain didn’t just have his Liber veritatis, a miniature catalogue of all his paintings, but actively used the modern medium of the etching in order to be known by a wider public. In Lorrain’s time few people got to see his originals, but thanks to inexpensive etchings his images started to circulate widely and became model to know and to imitate. In Italy for instance there were towns specialized in the production of inexpensive etchings sold at market places, a phenomenon which further enhanced the (indirect) knowledge of topical landscapes.

I very much agree with you that originally even artists didn’t actually have a direct knowledge of mountains. They knew them rather through illustrations and representations, since they produced all their work in their ateliers.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Exactly. And I think this is really a key idea in what I’m trying to do with my work.

I’m trying to explore the moment when humanity took the wrong turn — because I think we are, at best, on a rough side road now, trying to find our way back toward something that might work for us in the future. We’ve lost our sense of harmony with the world we live in — a harmony we actually need in order to survive.

“Disharmony” is a very mild word for it. A species that destroys the planet that sustains it cannot survive. And that’s the path we’re currently on. I don’t want to go too deep into this — it’s a much larger discussion — but you know what I mean. I’m interested in understanding where exactly we went wrong.

I’m not just referring to the Industrial Revolution, though of course that’s one clear turning point — a very technical one. You can go even further back: to the discovery of fire, to the burning of fossil fuels. But I also think there was a philosophical turning point — a shift in how we imagined nature and our relationship to the planet.

That shift made it possible for us to do all the other, more technical things that have led to destruction — to the extinction of species and to the degradation of ecosystems. Through my work, I’m trying to trace this moment visually — to identify where that wrong turn happened. Was it with the emergence of Christianity as an institutional religion? Did it have to do with the rise of mass media?

Perhaps it began with what we call “the invention of nature” itself — an idea that may have been flawed from the start, one that allowed us to justify exploiting and destroying what should have remained beyond our control. So I’m constantly trying to put my finger on that point — the moment when the deviation began.

It might be the moment when humans began to mass-produce images of landscapes. I’m not sure — it’s an open question — but that’s why I’m drawn to it.

And if we look at what’s happening today, it’s fascinating to see how a new medium — social media — is reshaping our relationship to landscapes all over again. Over the past twenty years, it’s arguably been the most transformative invention.

There was this moment recently in the Dolomites that made it very clear: the mountains were completely overrun by influencers. It was all over the Italian news — hundreds of people lining up in the same spot to take the same selfie with the same backdrop, following the same model.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Yes, I saw the photographs.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
And this happened very recently, which is why it’s quite interesting that we’re having this conversation now — it all took place after I made the painting in the mine. It clearly shows how a new medium can have an enormous impact on a mountain landscape, simply by overloading it with people who are all trying to reach the same spot. I find this idea fascinating.

MICHAEL JAKOB
There are a lot of things to say, and I think that this is just the start of a conversation between us. The first paradox I would like to mention is the fact that generally speaking Nature is in a terrible state today. We moderns have actively destroyed almost everything we could destroy, and that at the same time we live in an age marked by “religion of nature”.

Everyone wants to be “kind” to nature. On the one hand, if we take the late Bruno Latour and his book Gaia, we humans are insane since we don’t really care about Nature and continue to destroy it, while acting at the same time as if we would really care about her. Where does this tradition of neglecting and violating Nature come from? There is of course the anti-ecological tradition of Christianism, the idea that we have to subdue and control Nature, and that the fact of “hurting” her does not really count. I would add another explanation. I think that something decisive happened in the fifteenth century. First of all, there was Brunelleschi with his famous “performance” staged in Florence, where he demonstrated central point perspective. This situation means that you have a single person standing still at the point P, with “reality” in front of them, a vis-à-vis-situation which immobilizes the viewer. This subject is completely frozen and in control of what they see. The military and cartographers were of course extremely interested in this rational or mathematical “way of seeing” explained and popularized by Brunelleschi’s experience. 

There is an interesting analogy between central or one-point perspective and another invention of the same time, i.e. the single page of Gutenberg’s printed books. If we compare the mirror of these pages with the earlier forms in presenting texts, that is manuscripts, we see a big difference: manuscripts are anarchic with the scribe or copyist having many choices. In inventing the (modern) printed page, Gutenberg imposed a frame. The two distinct new technologies, perspective representation and verbal representation on the book page, both used so to speak a fixed rational frame. One gave birth to a viewing machine, the other to a reading machine. The grid and the avant-garde paintings of the late 15th century as well as the book pages with their standardized columns created both a field and a form of attention, a psychological attitude related to the idea of control: to control the world by looking “correctly” at it, or by reading a text in the “proper” way. Of course one has to be very careful with the tempting possibility to identify these innovations in a strict temporal way. We know that especially certain philosophers love to indicate a precise date for the great changes which affected humanity. Stephen Toulmin comes to mind with the year 1610, while other intellectuals will opt rather for the year 1492. Still other historians remind us of the importance of 1543, the year of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, of De humani corpore by Vesalius, and of the princeps of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. I however totally agree with you that something relevant happened in modern times and brought us to where we are today.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
That’s very interesting. What you describe as the “religion of nature” is exactly what I’ve been thinking about, though I express it differently. You work with words; I work with images. I try to find visual forms for this idea.

When I whipped the ocean or whipped the Alps, it was a performance, but also an image. For me it was a physical and emotional act—painful, even ritualistic—but it ultimately became an image for others to see. It asks: why would someone whip nature? It provokes reflection on this strange, almost religious relationship we have with nature. Perhaps this attitude is the root of our problems—but maybe it could also be part of the solution.

I’m not sure. Maybe we need a kind of religion to keep us from destroying each other—not necessarily organized religion, but something within us that needs to believe, something that shapes how we act. My visual research is a way of investigating this.

When I filmed natural catastrophes like hurricanes or chased storms, I slowed them down to make the viewer feel the storm differently. Is there a god or goddess raging within it? Is that what we’re sensing? When a forest fire devours everything, is it a divine force at work—or simply destruction we read as punishment? Many people project these events back onto humanity, seeing them as moral consequences: “You acted wrongly, and now nature strikes back.” That, too, is a deeply religious interpretation.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Your example is even mythological, more than religious—lightning takes us back to Zeus or Jupiter, doesn’t it?

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Exactly. It’s a kind of pre-monotheistic idea. I’ve long believed that humanity moves in cycles—from natural religions to polytheism, then to monotheism—and that now we might be returning to a new kind of natural religion. My work tries to explore that. For instance, my first Landscape Painting—made in collaboration with Maya—was done in the jungle.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Yeah, I saw that. You painted the vegetation white, didn’t you?

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Exactly. That project explored how different people construct the idea of “nature,” and how those constructions vary depending on one’s position—whether it’s a monotheistic or polytheistic worldview.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Yeah, I’m quite interested in how you formulate this. We could even speak of a form of Neue Mythologie, New Mythology, as Friedrich Hölderlin used to call it.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Right. And it’s the wealthy who now travel to the jungle to drink ayahuasca in luxury retreats, searching for a “new god.” There’s a whole movement of people trying to reach something beyond rationalism, beyond the scientific or nach der Aufklärung—beyond the Enlightenment—something after it.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Fortunately, there are artists who rather than going to luxury retreats, tried to discover and integrate in their artwork the archaic and mythological past. I think of Robert Smithson’s works in Yucatan or Anna Mendieta.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
For me, it’s essential not just to read about these things, but to experience them directly. I spent quite some time in Colombia with Indigenous communities while researching lightning. Before creating works in which I triggered lightning by firing rockets into thunderstorms, I wanted to understand what lightning means.

It’s one of the few natural phenomena we still cannot control. It seems random to us, yet for the people I met—the Wiwa in northern Colombia—it carries profound meaning. Some of them had lost loved ones to lightning strikes, and I wanted to understand: is that seen as divine punishment, bad luck, or simply nature? What does it mean for them? And how does that differ from Western, Christian, European interpretations?

My theory is that when nature kills someone close to us—when a storm, a flood, or a bolt of lightning takes a life—that’s when our true feelings about nature surface. In such moments, our feelings are not abstract anymore; it’s deeply real as we can’t control when it becomes subconscious. The answer and the feeling are very different if you ask “what do you think about nature?” at any given moment or in conjunction with a catastrophe—these are the moments that interest me most.

MICHAEL JAKOB
Once we are in danger, of course, aesthetics becomes very critical. It reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, his last black and white film before Deserto Rosso. There is a group of friends on an island in Sicily, civilized and modern people used to comfort, leisure, modern tourists looking for beautiful or sublime prospects. Then a terrible storm hits, and everything changes because the same people who were naively looking for beautiful scenery now care only for their own survival. The aesthetic disappears, and the only thing which counts is the individual’s existence.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
That’s precisely the moment that fascinates me. In our modern mindset, we assume we are the actors and nature merely reacts. Even when there’s a violent storm, we still see it as nature’s reaction to human actions.

But when you’re in the middle of a storm, that perspective vanishes. You’re no longer acting—you’re reacting. Nature acts.

I’ve experienced this in the mountains of Ticino: when the thunder comes, you have no choice but to respond. Or once, in the Mediterranean, I was caught in a storm in a tiny rented boat. The waves were higher than the vessel itself. I could almost see myself praying to the god of the sea, begging not to be killed by the next wave. Fear made me instinctively religious. When you think you might die, you start to pray—even if you believed you never would.

Those were decisive moments for me, and they became part of my ongoing research. I was even struck by lightning once—which, in its own way, was another kind of revelation.