Thomas Kneubühler

Edwin Janzen on the artist book «Alpine Signals»
Review in Espace art actuel No 131, 2022

Thomas Kneubühler — Alpine Signals

It is a commonplace of alpine photography that a mountain landscape's elements - impressive peaks, woodlands, sleepy chalets, lazy cows in meadows, ponies munching on Edelweiss – be arranged according to a kind of asymmetrical "balance." Although compositions, they must seem natural, even casual. So long as the landscape is seen to relax, so can we, praising the- picture tautologically as being properly like itself: picturesque.

Kneubuhler's images-do indeed lead us to such genre-positive picturesquerie, if also to less accommodating non-lieux. Against either backdrop, however, new and less well-behaved objects now intrude upon the landscape: cell towers-spiny, exoskeletal, a little like orcish swords in Tolkien tales. Many of them, situated mid-photo, cleave the image, and its calculated asymmetry, neatly in two.

As Duclos remarks, the cell tower's "thingness" is "complex to define." Indeed, it only hints at its own throughput-as Duclos has it, "an intangible Alpine wind." Comprising email and text messages, online shopping, multiplayer games, file sharing, streaming, legal finance, illegal finance, porn, military codes, Dark Web hermetics - at every moment, this aethereal torrent of signals courses through the Engadin. How do we even imagine such a commerce? Expensive CGI? Van Gogh's Starry Night? C-beams glittering in the dark?

Where other infrastructure, such as roads, seem naturalized, nestled in the landscape, the cell towers are a quiet yet conspicuous presence, a superimposition. Perhaps their relative newness as a technology lends them a neutrality - a dubious neutrality - that we simply haven't had sufficient time to understand, to naturalize?

Even these relatively recent technological newcomers are not immune, however, to the magnetism of alpine kitsch. In one of Kneubühler's images, a chalet perches atop a rocky cliff, its windows forming a coy, bemused face. Towards one end of the roof stands a cell tower; like a proud feather on a William Tell hat. There, a postcard! Wish you were here. (Edwin Janzen)