Friday next week I will be speaking about a research I have started together with Guus Diepenmaat, Victor Kössl and Sandra Sieczkowski this year (a short-film is in the making about this. The title of my presentation will be "The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier" and will be part of a Panel with the wonderful title "Guilt-tripping on the loss of Wilderness". Below you can find the abstract of both my talk and the symposium in general as well as all the necessary info.
National Parks as zones for consuming Nature? The entanglement of the car with our love for the high peaks examined through the lens of the Glocknerhochalpenstraße
The Glocknerhochalpenstraße is Austria’s perhaps most famous street, leading directly to the countries biggest glacier, the Pasterze. Right next to its melting glory, you can find a 5-story parking house and an exhibition of racing cars. If you drive a bit further up the road that leads through the core protection area of Central Europe’s biggest National Park, you can drink an overpriced coffee at the Porsche Café and chat with car enthusiasts of all countries, who came here for a day ride to enjoy nature. The tarmac of the entire street is full of tyre tracks from the frequent drift races.
In this input presentation of an ongoing research, I want to look behind the apparent contradictions of such Nature Protection zones to look for their hidden entanglements. Rather then regarding the car as “bad for Nature”, I regard it as a machine that produces Nature for us as something to be consumed. By examining the history of the development of National Parks, their expropriation of indigenous tribes and their agenda of “protection of Nature”, I want to raise questions for an environmentalism of the future and a re-diversification of what it means to be human. The challenge for National Parks of the catastrophic future might turn out to again disentangle humans from their self-identification with cars.
This Is Not a Glacier
Thickening Description for Thinning Ice
Glaciers are often portrayed as icons of global warming because of their physical loss through melting and the loss of climate records stored in glacial ice. This is an attempt at a more multifaceted, heterogenous and thicker description of a glacier, beyond its current reductive stereotype.
(The Photos are screenshots from the film-project mentioned above)
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