To be within the vicinity of the Dolomites is to sense galactic time. The ridged contours of these 250-million-year-old coral reefs stretch into the sky, their grandiloquence magnified at the cusp between day and night. It is unsurprising that these monumental structures that bear testimony to an erstwhile sea should be the subject of folkloric legends, particularly within the Indigenous Ladin community. Versions of ancient accounts that survived orally were collected, recorded and codified by the Austrian journalist, poet and folklorist Karl Felix Wolff who published them under the title Dolomiten Sagen (1913), narrativising them as the story of the people of Fanes, who had allied with marmots, of whom they were descendants.

The Legend of the Fanes serves as the conceptual grounding for The Parliament of Marmots, the ninth edition of Biennale Gherdëina, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, director of GAMeC in Bergamo. “…for it was among those animals—entrusted to them by Anguana, the water nymph—that their foremother Moltina had been brought up,” Giusti writes in his curatorial introduction. A series of events leads to the breaking of the Fanes’ pact with the marmots and, as the kingdom of the Fanes falls into decline, the few survivors seek refuge beneath the rocks, where they continue to wait until the silver trumpets herald the kingdom’s rebirth.

Guisto, in an interview with Elise Morton for Euro News, says he found the name ‘Parliament of Marmots’ on a topographical map. It was first used in the 1950s to allude to a plateau on the Alpe di Fanes that hosts a natural rock amphitheatre. “I walked there and actually found marmots. They have become accustomed to the presence of man. They do not let themselves be approached, but neither do they hide as is their wont (sic).”  When he later read up about the Fanes’ secret pact with the marmots and the wars that ensued when it was broken, he found in it a powerful metaphor for our present. Consequently, the works within the Biennale either hint towards a prelapsarian utopic ideal or echo strains of cross-species dialogue or drift along notions of wilding, shifting away from humans as protagonists while also advocating a reconfiguration in terms of how we sensorially imbibe the world around us.

Femmy Otton’s Hourglass, stationed in front of the façade of the Castle Gardena–a one-time summer residence and hunting lodge is a case in point. Composed of carved human sensory organs and other body parts, the work, the Linden wood sculpture features a vulva at its mid-point. The erstwhile summer castle and hunting lodge dating to 1622 lies at the foot of Mount Langkofel, between St. Christina and Wolkenstein. Hourglass comes into view only when you advance upwards towards the castle. It is one of three installations by Otton, the second, The Mountains and the Vulva is tucked on a corner of the façade and is literally a vulva that seems like a hinge, a portal and a totem.

Through the archway that leads into the courtyard, one glimpses a blue-tinted sculptural being that appears like a marine creature arrested in movement. Titled Anguane’s Fountain (2024), this mixed-media work by Diana Policarpo was inspired by the shape of the Chondrocladiia lampadiglobus, a carnivorous ocean sponge, and references ‘anguanes’, female figures in Ladin mythology that protect mountains, forests and waters. Installed in the centre of the courtyard, a spurt of water oozing from the top keeps the work continuously drenched, coupling its artistic raison d'être with its architectural function as a decorative fountain. A multi-channel sound composition fusing verbal and non-verbal sounds created with the research collective COBRACORAL activates the space around the sculpture, infusing it with a quasi-mystical aura and locating it within the realm of mythology.

The artworks playfully interact with the castle’s derelict interiors. On the wall behind Anguane’s Fountain, a decrepit sculpture of the angel Gabriel is kept in place by rocks. In the only room accessible to visitors, Otton’s third sculpture—a postpartum mother and child assemblage—lies on the floor. A third hand connects the baby—positioned closer to the mother’s feet—to the belly as if it were a kind of umbilical cord. Further outdoors, encompassing a phenomenal view of the mountains, Ladin artist Tobias Tavella’s Nomadic Drum (2024) completes the sculptural dialogue at work at this venue. A scaffolding composed of found ski equipment holds in place a large drum made by repurposing a found satellite dish. The object is meant to travel during the Biennale to Juac, located within the World Heritage Site of The Dolomites. The large-scale drum resembles a giant ear or an aural transmitter and receptive device. Viewed in relation to Otton and Policarpo’s work, Nomadic Drum seems to further the idea of bodies as intercepting devices and sites of inter-generational memories across species.

Like Castle Gardena, many of the Biennale’s venues consist of disused sites or private spaces. “All locations were visited together with the artists involved in the new productions, then discussed together and distributed on the basis of requests or needs expressed by the artists themselves,” Giusti said in an email. “They are almost all private sites made available by their owners.” One such incredible venue is Hotel Ladinia, an erstwhile hotel whose interiors feel haunted. The walls of what was perhaps the lobby are adorned with the 20 exquisite pastel shaded acrylic-on-canvas works that comprise Daniele Genadry’s Apparitional Mountains (pink) I-XX that artfully reveal the famed ephemeral glow of the Dolomites at the threshold of dusk. In an anteroom towards the back one finds an immersive installation by Michael Höpfner that feels completely infected by his metabolic way of imbibing the terrain of the mountains through the exercise of walking, in this instance, the Fanes Plateau. Titled Plateau–A Walking Life (2024), silver gelatine prints, collages and drawings are arranged in a kind of labyrinth composed of yarn that the viewer must navigate.

Other commissions and installations were spread across the hyper-touristy town of Ortisei / St. Ulrich in Val Gardena / Gröden. Julius von Bismarck’s monumental black sculpture Beetle On A Horse (2024) is fabulously camouflaged before the façade of a hotel called White Horse. It plays with the grandiloquent nature of ubiquitous equestrian statues that are odes to the conquerors astride them. Made with stone pine wood, the massive black horse and rider assemblage replaces the human victor with the bark beetle whose ravaging impact on the surrounding forests is visible. The bark beetle burrows inside trees and chews away their bark, cutting off the flow of nutrients, and effectively killing them. Bismarck’s sculpture serves as a poetic counterpoint to the apparent normalcy that pervades the town, which suffers from over-tourism. The sculpture reads like an omen signalling the destruction humans bring upon themselves and the earth through the continuing frenzy of over-consumption amid late-stage capitalism.

The ninth edition of Biennale Gherdëina certainly succeeds in its curatorial mission.

One of the undercurrents running through numerous works is the notion of linking the mountains and the sea. The fact that the Dolomites were coral reefs is a reminder of the region’s oceanic past. But in terms of the range of artists whose works are represented in the Biennale, there’s a clear sense of a curatorial spread beyond the Western understanding of the Mediterranean. “We were inspired by a re-reading of the Ladin myths of the Dolomites. Within them, we can recognise some typical narrative structures and archetypes of the great Mediterranean tradition, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the myths of archaic Greece. Hence the idea of trying to link together mountains separated by the sea: the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian Atlas, the Egyptian Sinai, the rocky hills of Palestine, the high mountains of Lebanon, as far as southern Turkey and Greece itself,” explained Giusti, who has been simultaneously curating a programme titled Thinking Like a Mountain at GAMeC. The two projects, while different, intersect in relation to certain topics. “The Parliament of Marmots rethinks the theme of the wild in relation to our hyper-civilised world and projects it on the ashes of hyper-consumption, while the Thinking Like a Mountain programme develops participatory projects, all born from the encounter between artists and local communities. Both projects seek to embrace an extended, dilated idea of time, proposing trajectories that are not rigidly anthropocentric,” Giusti said.

The ninth edition of Biennale Gherdëina certainly succeeds in its curatorial mission. The works across all venues seem unafraid to wrestle with the urgencies of our current crises by de-centralising and destabilising the vantage point of the human in lieu of the more than human. The frequently poetic, artful, yet straightforward works, many of which have been specifically commissioned for this ninth edition, harness the mythic dimensions of the landscape in which they are contextualised. They dismantle conventional notions of the ‘spectacular’ through their material constitution and their presentation. They are not grandiose in terms of form, in fact, they sometimes blend in so seamlessly within the environment, that they feel camouflaged, as if they had always been there. As you ‘sight’ them, they surface more poignantly within your field of vision. Especially in the case of the numerous outdoor sculptures, which seem almost to have been made for the elements and not necessarily for human consumption. They seem like gestural offerings made to broker a new alliance with the storied marmots.

The ninth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina, 'The Parliament of Marmots', is open to the public from May 31 - September 1, 2024.