It seems that French artist Pierre Huyghe is rather busy at the moment. After creating a beguiling environment at Documenta 13, and a retrospective first at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, narrowly missing out to Albainian/French artist Anri Sala, as runner up, at the 2014 Vincent Award at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague; the next project that followed the French conceptual artist was being chosen for the next rooftop installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. Now the prominent artist has his ambitions set on new heights, literally it would seem.
As from February 26 to 28, an expedition will be led by French artist Pierre Huyghe to the Swiss Alps. This expedition/performance is entitled ‘What Will Happen’, the expedition is a collaboration between Huyghe and the architects and artists Francois Roche and Camille Lacadee, from the collective New-Territories.
At the Wollman skating rink in Central Park in 2005, the artist made a glacial landscape that was the setting for “A Journey That Wasn’t,” a musical film based on a trip to Antarctica; now the piece ‘What Will Happen’ will explore the stories and phenomena surrounding the Diavolezza glacier in the Alps, as well as the legend of the she-devil from which the mountain takes its name. For many Generations, climbers have told stories of how ‘La Diavolezza’ lured hunters to their deaths.
The art extravaganza will be a two day trip beginning in the Swiss town of St Moritz, where a recommissioned Alpine train from the 1910s will take the participants on a journey towards the frozen lake of Lej Nair, at the top of the Bernina Pass.
The aim of the art project/expedition/performance is to raise awareness to climate change and the effect that human activity has on the environment, a subject which the French artist is deeply engaged with. Through the storytelling of La Diavolezza myth, which conjures ideas of death and disappearance, its use juxtaposes the myth with the vanishing glacier. The expedition will result in a film by Huyghe and New-Territories, which will premiere next spring at the LUMA Foundation, in Arles in France.