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 was developed over two years through research and in exchange with the Swiss National Park in the Engadine. The works connect this unique local context to global questions around climate change by focusing on the forced climb of plants due to rising temperatures. Up, Up, Up consists of a three channel video installation, a screen print, a sculptural intervention and and a series of 16 drawings. The work 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 images as well as our own diminished attention spans and is therefore generally not even perceived as violence. It’s literally outside the frame. How can we bring it into the frame, how can we make it visible differently?