Somewhere Nowhere

In Chinese thought, mountains are conceived through the interplay of qi (氣), li (力), yin (陰), and yang (陽), a vision that emphasises relationality and continuous transformation. This contrasts with the conventional modern imagination of mountains as isolated, self-contained entities, often instrumentalised as places for detached, objective observation. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, these aren’t just different cultural perspectives but distinct ways of thinking and inhabiting the world. I’m interested in how such contrasting understandings shape our relation to mountains. How might they intersect, or even transform one another?

Mountains, indeed, are not a fixed or universal category but a relative one, each culture develops its own definition of what a mountain constitutes. Whether conceived purely as geological formations or as powerful symbols, the understanding of mountains is entangled with cultural, spiritual, and material conditions that mediate how they are imagined and experienced.

In proximity to the Alps, where I grew up, a mountain is often defined by its altitude; yet this criterion is culturally specific. In regions not characterised by such higher peaks, lower valleys may still be perceived as mountains. Thus, mountains cannot be defined merely by their physical properties but by how each culture relates to them, both materially and imaginatively. Although conceived as more than a geological formation, setting the boundary of what a mountain constitutes, and thus defining it, is complex and almost impossible. As French geographer Raoul Blanchard wrote: “a definition of the mountain which would be clear and inclusive is in itself almost impossible to provide.” Some scholars agree that, rather than analysing and defining mountains based on physical properties, it is more appropriate to look at mountains as the “product of a social and political construction” since “a mountain is a mountain because of the part it plays in popular imagination.” The idea of a mountain lies in great part within its figuration and the methods of its representation. It is shaped by how we depict, describe, and relate to it. In this sense, it becomes meaningful to approach mountains through the lens of representation, as they occupy a key place in many cosmological narratives.

Rather than seeking a synthesis or intersection between these different ways of conceiving and representing mountains, I find it more useful to explore their diversity, to examine alternative understandings in which mountains act as cosmological devices beyond the Western paradigm. How do different cultures conceptualise and use mountains as both a medium and a technological apparatus for encountering the cosmos? Both through astronomical images and cosmological diagrams that express perceived orders of the universe, these visual operations together shape collective ways of imagining the cosmos.

We appreciate how you link the notion of mountains to altitude and perception in relation to your background.

In Mountains as Cosmic Technologies, you mentioned the “view from nowhere” in Western epistemology, a kind of disembodied, “God's-eye view.” It resonates with the visual culture of modernity: the tendency to observe the world from an abstract, detached vantage point. The Blue Marble image of the Earth is one example: it presents a view that places the observer outside the world itself, perceiving through an external relation.Interestingly, traditional Chinese Shanshui painting also employs a kind of “view from nowhere,” though one grounded in Taoist ideas of unity between self and cosmos. Rather than comparing them directly, I’m curious how you think about this condition of seeing without a fixed position: how different visual regimes negotiate between detachment and relationality. How do you see these tensions influencing the role of mountains as cosmic imaginaries that mediate between what we know and how we relate to the world?

In Western epistemology, there is a tendency to render the world legible through abstraction. This mode of depiction, which became radicalised during the Enlightenment, made certain places appear more suitable for scientific research than others and established that scientific knowledge, in order to be credible, had to be somehow detached from the place where it was produced. Within this intellectual framework, mountains – precisely because of their perceived isolation and “nowhere-ness” – captured the fascination of the Western scientific community by the late eighteenth century. Much like the emerging site of the laboratory, mountains were seen to share a kind of sterility – pure, uncontaminated and distant, in the sense of separation from the rest of the world.

Yet, mountains themselves revealed the limits of such abstraction, exposing detachment as a construct of the scientific gaze rather than a real condition: the scientist’s effort to create or maintain a sterile, isolated, self-contained space was constantly challenged by the environment itself. Injury, death, and environmental disruption served as constant reminders that any detachment from the world, if it ever existed, was only temporary. Indeed, rigorous scientific practice, when situated in proximity to mountainous regions, often encountered interruptions and fragmentations of the pure scientific protocol. Many astronomers’ records reflect this, leaving them with more questions than answers and showing that the techniques of scientific inquiry often became secondary to the techniques of survival. Ironically, in striving to achieve the so-called “view from nowhere,” they were confronted with the full complexity of a very specific “somewhere.”

Essentially, I think the main difference between the two examples you bring up is that the Western scientific approach manifests more as an evacuation of the self from the subject matter, rather than a dissolution of boundaries between self and world. It is a pose, an attitude of seeing the surrounding environment as detached, failing to recognise it as an active participant in the creation of knowledge itself. In fact, scientists could never deny their dependence on the proximity and goodwill of local communities: not only were observatories located in environments that revealed the illusion of detachment, but researchers were also deeply reliant on local knowledge and support. Yet, the names, expertise, and cultures that contributed to the scientific success of these observatories remain largely unknown, as historical records, sometimes scientific, sometimes mountaineering, tend to highlight only figures within the scientific community. Through their writings and published accounts, scientists deliberately cultivated the image of operating in complete isolation, reinforcing the notion that their research was free from external influence. In truth, the isolation claimed by astronomers was more a constructed narrative than a factual condition. Thus, while the narrative of isolation helped confer an aura of scientific purity, it simultaneously obscured the essential role played by local communities.

Earlier, you spoke about mountains as entities defined not just by measurable parameters but through lived experience. That opens a way to think about the medium itself as a kind of cosmotechnics. Your work moves across moving image, diagram, editorial design and installation, each carrying its own material characteristics and epistemic potential. In that sense, each medium might be understood as a “technic,” a way of producing and engaging knowledge shaped by distinct cosmotechnical imaginaries. How do you navigate these different media in your work to explore the plurality of cosmotechnical imaginaries? And how does the specificity of each medium shape your understanding of the mountain as both subject and mediator of knowledge?

When I started working on this project, one of the biggest questions I had was how to use visuals to express ideas or questions. Unlike writing, which can address specific points quite directly, conveying meaning through visuals alone can be challenging. Yet, since the places I was engaging with were so massive, I think that, perhaps unconsciously, breaking the research into fragments and exploring its different facets through multiple methodologies became a way to grapple with such vastness. Each medium, in this sense, is not just a tool but a mode of thinking – a way to understand the multiple layers of a place that is both metaphorically and geologically complex. Reconfiguring my research through different media allowed me to explore the mountain as landscape, as archive, as entity, as interface, and as technology.

If we take the movie, for example, one question that stayed with me throughout was: how can I portray the mountain as an agent and thus a character within the film? The same applied to the editorial and photographic work, where the juxtaposition of images was crucial: does placing this image next to another tell the story I intend, that the mountain can be a cosmotechnics in one sense, but also in another?

In your reflections on process, it seems there’s an implicit sense of multiplicity, the idea that each medium, and perhaps each mountain, contains overlapping meanings and technics. You've worked extensively with the Alps, not just as a landscape but as a complex apparatus where scientific, cultural, and symbolic forces converge. The Alps are not only shaped by glaciers and deep time, but also by military infrastructures, mining economies, colonial-era scientific institutions, and, more recently, climate observation and digital infrastructure.

From your perspective, how have the Alps functioned as a kind of media infrastructure, a place where different ways of seeing, measuring, and imagining the world are materially encoded? And how does your practice engage with these overlapping and sometimes conflicting conditions?

I find the Alps to be a place that has undergone so many shifts in perception that it’s almost impossible to list them all: from an unknown, uncharted, and terrifying territory to a romantic mirror of the soul and ultimate expression of the sublime; from a site to be conquered and studied, to natural national borders, frontier space, and finally a touristic infrastructure. Moreover, the Alps are such a vast and heterogeneous entity that even moving just ten kilometres can completely alter their perception and appearance. What fascinates me is how, over time, they have constantly reconfigured themselves through the eyes of each era, never fully fitting the rigid definitions imposed upon them. I find it both poetic and revealing that in every projection or speculation about the Alps, they always show more than we expect. In a sense, they both exceed and elude us, in their strength and fragility alike, showing that some aspects of them remain external to the weave of human place-making and often resist such efforts.

That connects back to what you said earlier about the “view from nowhere.” It’s not just about how we see, but how seeing itself shapes relations. Modernity has long operated through binaries such as objective and subjective, human and non-human, scientific and mythical. But what you’re suggesting is that cosmology, understood not as a universal order but as a living negotiation, gestures toward a world composed of many worlds, where different cosmotechnical imaginaries coexist, intersect, and at times conflict. And maybe within that, the mountain stands as both witness and mediator, showing how these perspectives refract one another and how, through such tensions, new ways of inhabiting the Earth may emerge.