Up Up Up

The warming climate is causing many changes in our environment and ecosystems which affect biodiversity. Some of these changes and effects are happening quite fast and are already very visible and get fair amount of attention. However, there are others, that take much longer to manifest and often elude our attention. Mountain ecosystems present an interesting contradiction: the climate is warming at a higher pace than the global average, yet the vegetation response is slower than might be expected. Nevertheless, plants—often thought of as unmoving—are shifting their habitat ranges in order to follow the conditions they are adapted to.
Up, Up, Up is a multipart installation by Uriel Orlow, developed between 2020 and 2021 in dialogue with researchers of the Swiss National Park in the Engadine. Filmed on the peak of Gorihorn, we witness a botanical survey conducted by botanist Sonja Wipf in order to compare the occurence of plant species today to previous surveys from the last 150 years. The imposing landscape images in the high mountains and the close-up shots of the plant
world at this extreme altitude, shift images of the Alps as we know them from tourism advertising, and counter them with the arduous research work, its attention to detail and perseverance.

Up Up Up is mindful of what environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon refers to as ‘slow violence’, that is a violence of delayed effects that escapes the spectacle-driven media representation of climate change as well as our own diminished attention spans.

On a separate screen the biologist reports on the alarming changes in this place. And a further abstract video work consisting of a sequence
of changing coloured screens taken from the climate warming strips, make the temperatures in Switzerland over the last 150 years palpable.