We are going through a period marked by a succession of political, social, economic, and climatic crises. Amid the complexity of analyzing and understanding these profound global transformations, the COVID health crisis has added yet another layer of uncertainty and doubt to the general feeling of no longer having control over either the future or one’s environment. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, people are searching for guidance, expressing a strong need to reconnect with nature, even as the demand for new sources of energy becomes increasingly urgent.
TREMBLEMENT / ERSCHÜTTERUNG, September 2021
TREMBLEMENT / ERSCHÜTTERUNG is a work by Séverin Guelpa that began in 2020, during the height of the COVID period. Together with the architects Kunik de Morsier, he travels through Switzerland to discover natural, built, or symbolic sites, each of which in their own way embodies the major upheavals of our time. Controversial deep geothermal energy projects in the Jura, a construction site for forced conduits in Valais, a shooting range in Zurich where the Swiss far-right party UDC holds its annual rally, or a village under evacuation threat in the Grisons—these are all situations that raise questions about the growing presence of risk and unpredictability in today’s world.
In 2022, during Switzerland’s energy crisis, Séverin Guelpa created DE PROFUNDIS TERRAE, which films the depths of the territory across various sites in Switzerland, all involved in the past, present, or future search for new energy sources. This includes the ETH scientific laboratory in Ticino, the drilling of the second Gotthard tunnel in Göschenen, abandoned mines near Martigny, the Mont Terri laboratory in the Jura, and the underground infrastructures of the Grande-Dixence in Valais.
Between 2023 and 2024, collaborations were established, notably with the MTA quarry in Valais, around a series of works and tests in the quarry. Alongside speleologists, he descended into the depths of the glaciers of Saas-Fee and the Plaine Morte, returning with images and sounds. In autumn 2024, the third part of the project is planned around the village of Brienz in the Grisons Alps, a village evacuated in 2023 due to the threat of collapse of a mountainside overlooking the village.
For TREMBLEMENT / ERSCHÜTTERUNG, Séverin Guelpa surrounds himself with experts and draws inspiration from scientific tests carried out in the field or in laboratories to explore the boundaries between a nature we thought we controlled, natural risk, and the role we intend to give unpredictability in our relationship with the world and our way of inhabiting it.
