One is located in the Gulf of Finland and protects the city of St. Petersburg from flooding, the other is more than 2’000 metres above sea level and serves to supply the city of Zurich with energy. One is 25 kilometres long, the other 115 metres high. A motorway runs over one, a hiking trail over the other.
We are talking about two dams, 2’500 kilometres apart in the Russian-Finnish and Swiss-Italian border regions, which we will explore during a collaborative project week with students and lecturers from the Art & Science Center of the ITMO University St. Petersburg (https://en.itmo.ru).
As elementary infrastructures of energy supply and civil protection, dams and barrages have been part of the landscape of numerous regions of the world since industrialisation. As monumental witnesses to the harnessing of natural resources and human efforts to bring natural forces under control, they challenge our notions of “untouched” nature. What was there before the dams were built? By whom and with what interests were they planned? What social and political conflicts arose in the course of their planning and realisation? What stories are entwined around them? What ecological effects do they have on the surrounding habitat? What did earlier generations expect from them and what (sustainable) futures can be imagined with them?
On a 5-day excursion to Bergell the participants are exploring the social, aesthetic, symbolic, technical, historical and ecological peculiarities around the Albigna dam by means of artistic, ethnographic and/or scientific practices and in exchange with experts on site.
Observations are exchanged and compared via Internet (Zoom, etc.) with those students and lecturers at the Art & Science Center of the ITMO University in St. Petersburg (https://en.itmo.ru), who are working on the Petersburg dam located in the bay in front of the city at the same time.