Redoubt: The Landscapes of Anxiety (2021)
A mountain pass is merely a bridge over oblivion, not a place to dwell. In a four-horsed post carriage, on an elephant, or on the bandaged feet of a pilgrim, it’s a place to shudder and move on. The Gotthard came relatively late to the pantheon of Alpine passes, even though it’s the shortest and lowest route from Italy to the German-speaking lands. It was not until 1230 or so that the Upper Reuss was crossed, with a bridge apparently designed by the devil, that the route opened and began its ascent to European mythology, borrowing a name from a popular German saint. The lunar plateau, of no special beauty, sits on the linguistic divide between Latin and Teutonic Europe, and the entry of Mussolini’s Italy into the second World War meant that Switzerland’s artillery now also had to point over a southern frontier. It seems particularly boorish to aim explosives into the deep beauty of the Leventina Valley, but that’s what had to be done. For fifty years, well past the end of the Cold War, young Swiss reservists practised for the absurdly unlikely event of an Italian invasion (or the more plausible possibility of a German aggressor’s retreat) by shelling the side of the San Giacomo mountain, from another labyrinth built inside the Saint Gotthard massif.
As a system of fortresses, the Gotthard brother bunkers of Sasso Pigna and San Carlo were able to rain down fire on the Furka, Grimsel and Gries passes, as well as deep into Ticino. At Sasso Pigno, the squadra al pezzo of 10-man teams could load and fire repetitive rounds, arcing up to 9000 meters in the sky, flying as far away as 27 kilometers to thud and roar into the earth. At San Carlo, 105mm howitzers were built into armoured turrets squatting on the earth, camouflaged as rock, able to fire 360 degrees without hesitation. Military planners probably thought the subterfuges to disguise the guns were ingenious, yet anyone looking can recognize their awkward shapes and yawning apertures, small monuments to that special, mid-century European brutalism that echoes the Maginot or the hard curves of the Atlantic Wall.
In this landscape, humans busy over the rock faces and burrow into the mountain’s crystalline clefts with the individual significance of ants. Yet collectively, we have managed to change it utterly. From cowering in the violent Reuss gorge on the first medieval ascents, this species has now blasted road tunnels, railway lines, cobbled and concrete roads, piled up dams, dug underground waterways for fresh water, erected pylons and strung electricity lines across the mountain scape in a mad web that argues with the horizon and proves, as if any proof were needed, that we simply cannot let anything be.
Any summer morning is met with the howls of motorcycles pulsing through the concrete gantries laid like stents into the side of the mountain. These things must be, bulwarks against the anxiety of nothing. And now, the next phase of the colonization of the European landscape is well under way, another expression of the fear of annihilation. Windmills, whose stop-start whine comes and goes at all hours of the night, are giant ghosts not striding across the land, but implanted there as if against their will, by our need for power, our need for salvation.