18. Maloja
Some places are defined by what they contain, others by what passes through them.
The Maloja Pass belongs to the second category.
Set on the western edge of the Engadine, where the high plateau breaks off abruptly to plunge towards the Val Bregaglia, the Maloja is not simply a high point in the mountains.
It is a threshold.
A place of passage.
A point of transformation.
For centuries people, goods, languages and cultures have passed through here.
Souvenir di montagna was installed here permanently in 2026, on the occasion of Transito, the Biennale Bregaglia curated by Anna Radaelli, at an altitude of eighteen hundred metres.
The work presents itself as a large inhabitable erratic boulder. At first glance it may recall a defensive structure, an observation post, a military construction set into the Alpine landscape.
This ambiguity is intentional. The proximity to the Festung Maloja is no coincidence. The fortress was built to guard the pass and defend the Swiss border against the possible expansionist ambitions of Fascist Italy: it arose from the need to watch, control, protect.
Souvenir di montagna performs an inversion.
It transforms the idea of defence into an occasion for observation and listening, replacing vigilance with contemplation.
The openings do not function as slits turned towards a threat, but as points of contact with the landscape. The interior is not a space of protection from the enemy, but a place to pause and immerse oneself in the mountain.
It is the same device described in 12. Slits, carried to its conclusion. There it was said that remove the enemy, and a way of seeing remains. Here the enemy is historically identifiable, the fortress that awaited it is a few hundred metres away, and the work settles in the midst of that memory without celebrating it or erasing it. It takes up some of its formal features in order to disarm them, turning a language conceived for conflict into a device for relating to nature.
There is also a geographical circularity that was not sought. The artificial wall on the Albula, encountered in 04. Faking the rock, lies in the same region, an hour’s drive away. The project begins in front of a military construction disguised as rock and develops in front of a constructed rock that lets itself be mistaken for a military construction. In between, the landscape has not changed: what has changed is what is done with it.
In a territory defined by transit, Souvenir di montagna thus proposes another crossing: the passage from the strategic gaze to the contemplative gaze, from defence to experience, from border to relationship.
And the boulder has gone back up. It had come down the valley more than twenty thousand years ago, carried by the ice; it had arrived in the city, in a schoolyard; now it stands once more on the pass, at the exact point where the ice once passed.
One question remains, and it no longer concerns the place. Where does this form come from.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Souvenir di montagna at the Maloja Pass, in front of the Festung rocks
Installation of Souvenir di montagna at the Maloja Pass. Placed below the Festung Maloja, the constructed erratic engages with a geography of transits, fortifications and rocky outcrops, making the landscape an integral part of the work.
Souvenir di montagna, 2026
Installation at the Maloja Pass
Installation at the Maloja Pass
Souvenir di montagna, 2026 (transport on site)
An irregular polyhedron forces the gaze to move, to circle around, to search for a position that never arrives. It makes the view depend on the point of observation.
An irregular polyhedron forces the gaze to move, to circle around, to search for a position that never arrives. It makes the view depend on the point of observation.
Simulation before the construction of the boulder
© Archivio Umberto Cavenago