Michael Höpfner
∗1972, Krems/Donau, Austria
Michael Höpfner’s artistic research consists of analogue black-and-white photographs, drawings, installations and sculptures that tell the story ofhis long journeys on foot across the remotest parts of the world, especially inEastern Europe, China and Asia. Equipped with an analogue Hasselblad camera, Höpfner traverses unspoilt natural locations, far away from or abandoned by civilisation, viewing walking as an artistic process in search of the qualities of existence in this austere and modest world. The starting point for this journey was the long period he spent on the Tibetan plateau at an altitude of over 4,500 metres between 2000 and 2008. In an existential quest, his artistic work is closely bound up in his encounters with shepherds and nomads and his immersion in their way of life. As a walker, Höpfner is mindful of the ground beneath his feet and how different worlds are revealed to him little by little. His photographs thus become a means for observing and processing vastness, emptiness and solitude both in detail and at a distance. ForThe Parliament of Marmots, Michael Höpfner explored the mythological, geological and philosophical dimensions ofthe Fanes Plateau in the heart of the Dolomites Nature Park, where the ancientpeople allied with marmots are said to have lived. Starting from the notion of the plateau as a rhizomatic structure and as a “continuous, self-oscillating regionof intensity,” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari inA ThousandPlateaus(1980), Höpfner developed a new anthological work for the rooms of the historic Hotel Ladinia in Ortisei. Alongside the various excursions in ValGardena, the artist also travelled through the Djebel Serj in the Tunisian Atlas mountains. He thus collected new material and at the same time immersed himself in the thousands of negatives and hundreds of notebooks recounting his journeys to the high plateaus, as well as his encounters with pastoral and nomadic populations over the last twenty-five years.
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